


Deep Learning

by seriousness



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Canon Retelling, F/M, Machine Learning AU, Maybe too much technical jargon sorry, Software Engineering AU, canon compliant AU, is that a thing?, techwontbuildit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 01:23:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 32,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15546507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seriousness/pseuds/seriousness
Summary: What really surprised her, though, was the most recent email she’d received. kren@firstorder.com had sent her an email called “Since you were curious…” that contained a single link. When Rey clicked it, it took her to a free online course called “Introduction to Machine Learning,” taught by a professor called Andrew Ng. He’d also emailed her a second time in a reply to his own email.Rey,Happy to answer questions if you have any after you’ve worked through the course. It’s very much worth your time.-KyloHuh, thought Rey. What the hell.--A modern AU about autonomous weapons systems, antiwar movements, and two confused nerds who accidentally forge a bond in the swirling center of it all.





	1. Rey 1

“Greetings, kren@firstorder-ct.com. You’re invited to collaborate on a FO Doc! Click here to access: SK Release Signoff.”

Every time Rey saw her First Order email address a little annoyance slid up her spine and narrowed her eyes. How careless did you have to be to assign someone whose legal name was Kira Rey “kren” instead of “krey” as she’d requested? But then, of course, how much did it even matter for a contractor limited to a year term of no more than 20 hours a week of rating and labeling tasks? Fuck First Order anyway. Such a terrible gig, but money was money and she’d run out of contract terms for their competitors who paid better. Rey shrugged and clicked. 

The result of her click was an error page. “You don’t have access to this document. Click here to request permission.” 

“Why did you _invite_ me if I wasn’t allowed to _see_ it?” she whispered to the computer, even more annoyed now. The bedraggled-looking man using the terminal next to her in the public library looked up at her, and she stuck her tongue out at him. This was time she could have used to earn, like, maybe fifteen entire cents. She clicked the link and closed the tab.

Not fifteen seconds later she got a chat.

“Who are you and why did you just request access to that SK doc? It’s restricted to fulltimers,” said one kren@firstorder.com. She hated this person immediately as one always hates a person with a very similar email address.

“someone sent me an invite? idk.”

“Ugh, look at your email address. Must have been a mistake. I bet you got included in the release owners group. I’ll track this down.” 

“u sure? i’m pretty important, probs need to see that release signoff. u own it? can u approve me?”

“Definitely a mistake.” What a tool.

“cool username btw.”

“I’m going to file a ticket to make sure IT stops issuing duplicate usernames across the firstorder and firstorder-ct domains. This is ridiculous.”

“idk dude maybe its legit. im rey btw.” She was just trolling him at this point. 

To his credit, he knew it. “Leave me alone.” 

Christ, what an asshole. On the other hand, she’d now forgone more like an entire _dollar_ in possible income. Back to labeling. Today they were having her draw little bounding boxes around numbers in blurry photographs. 

Thirty minutes later she got another email, inviting her to another document. This one was called “Digit detection preliminary results.”

“bro do u work with data from raters,” she shot off to her new, grouchy friend.

“Why do you ask? By the way, they’ll be addressing my ticket shortly. You should pick a new username. Do not call me ‘bro’.”

“im a rater, just got invited to a doc about digit detection and i’m totes DOING digits rn. small world right???? and btw i didnt even want this email i asked for krey@ and someone messed it up if u can get em to change it for me thatd be amazing. i asked and they said no.”

“I’ll see what I can do. I’m blocking you." 

“naaa cmon don’t be like that i wana know what its like using this data. how does it work??? i’m trying to learn programming in night school rn please i don’t really know any real actual coders.”

“No. Enjoy your class.”

“pleeeeease”

_Your message was not delivered_ , read the chat window.

“ _Ass_ hole,” Rey said aloud. 

“Missy, if you can’t be quiet I’m going to go speak with the librarian,” the unkempt man next to her said.

“Mister, if _you_ can’t - ” Rey began to retort, then remembered she was on strike two at this library. “Sorry, sir,” she corrected herself. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. Just a minor disagreement with a work colleague.” 

“I don't care if you're having a major disagreement with the Dalai Lama, you need to do it quietly if you're using a library computer.”

“Now you're being just as loud as she was,” observed an enormous man with full-sleeve tattoos on both arms who was using the computer on the other side of the table. “Let's all be considerate in the library.”

“God, this is the most obnoxious library in Queens. I'm out of here before you jerks get me another strike.” Rey picked up the plastic bag she used as a purse and stormed out. A librarian raised both eyebrows at her as she left.

It was time to catch the bus anyway. Rey had not been strictly honest with her new work chat acquaintance. She was not currently taking programming classes, per se. However, she had enrolled in Intro to Computer Science and Programming in Python at Queensborough Community College, it was going to start that very same evening, and she really was feeling earnest about making it to class. It was going to take a long damn time on the bus from her place in Corona though, so she knew not to get her hopes up too much. She’d been burned by big dreams before of figuring out some way to get a toehold on the American dream - she’d gotten her GED, that was great, that counted, but once she had that she hadn’t figured out anything else to do that didn’t require some kind of enormous up-front investment, with an uncertain payoff years down the line. Part of her knew she should really just try and pick up a shift at Mr Plutt’s terrible pawn shop tonight instead of deluding herself that this class was going to be any different than the last few times she’d tried to finagle her way into one educational scheme or another. 

It was so fucking hard to be poor in New York, and so much fucking harder to figure out how to go be poor someplace cheaper. At least here she knew how to manage herself. She knew which food banks to go to on which days of the week, which bills she could be late on and which had to be on time. If someone figured out her social security number was fake she knew where she could get another one; if someone noticed her ID was fake, that too. She had a terrible little studio in a dilapidated building but at least she knew the neighbors were okay and sometimes the landlord gave her a break on rent if she did odd repair jobs that came up. And if her parents ever came back, they’d find her in Corona, just where they’d left her so many years ago. If none of her other reasons were enough, well, her parents were enough. Even if they hadn’t left her with much more than a single name. 

But in the meantime, it wasn’t much of a life. She looked around the bus and saw ten, thirty, fifty years into her own future. And she clenched her jaw and said to herself, in just the smallest little whisper, “I am going to make it to every fucking session of this class, and I am going to learn to code.” 

But she didn’t really believe it.

\--

She was on time, if only just, and sat down in the middle of the front row with her shiny new notebook and her pencil. There was one other person in the front, a neatly pressed fellow with skin the color of milk chocolate who shot her a radiant grin as the instructor walked in and began. 

“Welcome to introduction to computer science. My ID says Assistant Professor Dameron, but I expect and hope you’ll feel comfortable enough to call me Poe. This is my instructional assistant, BB-8,” he said, holding up the leash of a complacent-looking corgi who made a little warbling yip in response to the class’s laughter. “You should consider BB-8’s opinions on your code and written work to be as important as my own, if not more important. Down, BB-8. Good girl.” The dog snuggled into a little orange-and-white ball and promptly dozed off. “Okay. So, what do we expect to learn in this class? I’ll point at you, say the first thing that pops into your head if I do.” He started pointing his finger wildly around the lecture hall.

“What does computer science even mean?” shouted one student.

“How to program!” said another. 

“Maybe something about fixing my computer?”

“How to get paid mad bank to sit at a desk!” 

From the back, “Loops and shit - sorry - stuff.” The class laughed.

“Hacking skills!”

He pointed at Rey. “Oh, I - I want to know how they use crowdsourced data. What it’s for.”

Then he pointed at the other guy in the front row. “I want a reason to move to California.”

“All great reasons to be in this class. Some we’ll get to, some probably a little less. I hope that you’ll be conversant in ‘loops and shit’ once we’re done with the semester, at least. Might take a few more years before you make it to San Francisco, friend, but never say never,” the professor said with a wink in radiant-grin-boy’s direction that might have been described as saucy. “But we’ve got to start with our ABC’s before we’re writing the Great American Novel. Who remembers hearing the word ‘variable’? Maybe in high school algebra?”

And so class proceeded. Rey took notes. She was pretty sure she got what was going on. Maybe computer science was going to be all right! The lecture was drawing to a close and it was time to find out whether they had any homework and whether she’d be able to do it without a computer of her own. And then Professor Dameron said the dreaded words she was hoping she wouldn’t hear. “Find a homework partner.” 

Rey sank a little bit into her seat in dismay. She was not someone who had ever done well when partners were required. Her life was a little too hard to explain, her social skills a little too rough around the edges. She was about to raise her hand and find out if it was okay to work alone when the radiant-smiling man a few seats down got up and held out his hand. 

“Hey, do you have a partner yet?” he asked.

“Do I look like I have a partner?”

“No, you don’t,” he said, his smile only growing wider. “I’m Finn.”

“Rey,” she replied. She noticed he was still holding out his hand, and decided he probably expected her to shake it, like some kind of vice president. She ignored the hand and he put it down.

“Nice to meet you, Rey. Boy, I’m so glad you looked as uncomfortable as I felt! I don’t know anyone in this whole school. It was cool what you said about wanting to know what they do with crowdsourced data. I wish I’d thought of something smart-sounding like that.” 

“Thanks. But I bet everyone in class wants to be your partner. You sounded honest and down to earth. Because of course most of us are here looking to code ourselves out of - well, out of New York, or out of - something.”

“You think?”

“Yeah.” 

“What are you trying to code your way out of?”

Luckily, Professor Dameron chose that moment to call the class back to order. “Everyone find someone to pair with? Raise your hand if you didn’t.” He did some quick matchmaking. “This semester you’ll be pair programming with your partner for all sixteen weeks. If conflicts arise, let me know, but a big part of coding is being able to work together as a team, and getting your heads around these concepts is going to be annoying sometimes. Having a partner who has your back can make all the difference. I’ve posted the first assignment on the course website. It’s due right before the next class - don’t worry, it isn’t too long. Just getting your development environment set up, and showing you can run a simple program. You won’t even have to write anything yourself. Just follow the instructions.”

He dismissed the class and turned his attention to Rey. “Hey, I hate to break it to you, but we probably won’t get to what you wanted to learn in this class. That’s a more advanced topic than most people get to cover in an associate’s degree, let alone an intro course. But please come to my office hours sometime if you can, I’d love to talk to you about it. I know it’s a pretty hot topic lately.”

“Yeah, okay,” Rey said, thinking privately that she probably would not do that, even though she knew she should. “Thanks.”

“Seriously, I can see you think you aren’t going to come to office hours, but I don’t bite and neither does BB-8.” The dog woke up as if she’d just heard herself being discussed, and Professor Dameron fed her a treat as he packed up his things to leave. 

Rey turned to Finn. “Do you want to just do the homework now? Do you have time?” 

“Uh, sure,” he said. “Do you want to use the computer lab, or do it from home?”

“I don’t have a reliable computer, so I’d rather use the lab. Otherwise I have to do it at the library, so if I have to install anything I’m screwed.”

“Got it.” Rey admired how Finn took the news of his inconvenient partner in stride. “So what you you think is the story with that dog? What kind of a name is that, BB-8?”

“Maybe he lost BB-7.” It wasn’t really funny, but Finn laughed anyway. Rey scowled at herself, a look Finn didn’t see as he walked beside her.

“You’re funny. Where’s your accent from?”

“I just talk weird,” Rey lied. “Speech impediment. I’ve lived in Queens my whole life.” 

Rey had taught herself to fake a British accent in uncomfortable social situations at a young age because she found people assumed she was smarter, older, and more sophisticated and independent when she sounded like that. Having a posh-sounding accent had come to her aid in more situations than she could count. It was easy to look past a little grime on someone who sounded like a rich lady from a movie. At this point, it was a reflex to use her British voice when she felt nervous or uncomfortable, which was most of the time. 

“Lucky! It sounds classy.”

“Beats a stutter, I’ll give it that. Do you live nearby?”

“Not too far. How about you?”

“Far enough. I’m going to do my best to make it to every class, but it’s like an hour on the bus.” 

“Ugh. That blows. Look, I’ll let you borrow my notes and everything if you can’t make it a few times, but you have GOT to stay in the class. I don’t want to have to find another partner. You seem really chill and normal and just - just the kind of person I think I can work with, and I have to admit I wasn’t sure I was going to find anyone like that in the class, so you really better just...just don’t drop it, all right?”

Rey had never before been called either “chill” or “normal,” but Finn’s rambling run-on sentence touched her heart. She snorted. “I’ll do what I can. But, life happens. You know.” 

“I do. But, come on, let’s make a deal. We’ll look out for each other. We’ll make sure we finish the course. Deal?” He held out his hand.

Rey looked at it for a second, not sure. Then she made a decision, and she shrugged. “Deal.” 

“You’re supposed to shake on it.” What was with this dude and handshakes?

“I - fine.” She grabbed his hand, jerked it once, then dropped it like a red-hot poker. “Let’s go do our homework.”

The homework was as straightforward as the professor had implied, and they finished going through the steps, which mostly consisted of typing arcane commands into a little black box on the screen, copying and pasting meaningless text with a bunch of punctuation into files on the computer, typing more arcane commands, and then copying and pasting what showed up in the box. “This is computer science?” Finn said. “I thought it would be more -”

“More empowering,” Rey said. “I thought I was going to learn something I could use right away.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, maybe next class,” Rey said with a wan little smile. “Do you want me to run this ‘turn_it_in.sh’ the assignment talks about?”

“Sure, I think we’re done.” Rey typed the command and hit enter, and the script chugged along and emitted a happy “ALL DONE” message. “Want to get some food?” 

“No thanks, I’ve got plans later.” Rey did not have plans later. But dining out wasn’t in her budget, especially not this month given how she’d stretched to pay her student fees. She had some beans and rice at home with her name on them. 

“Cool, okay! See you Tuesday.” Finn left the lab whistling.

Finn was nice and Rey kicked herself for not being friendly. She promised herself she’d do better next time. She logged into her personal email and then, out of curiosity, checked her First Order account as well.

She was surprised but not that surprised to find that when she signed in with her username, she was redirected to sign in with krey@firstorder-ct.com instead. She’d gotten a few more document invitations with cryptic names and a couple of completely incomprehensible emails, but they’d stopped coming a few hours after they’d started. Whatever mixup had crossed the streams between her and the grouchy jerk from chat had clearly been resolved.  

What really surprised her, though, was the most recent email she’d received. kren@firstorder.com had sent her an email called “Since you were curious…” that contained a single link. When Rey clicked it, it took her to a free online course called “Introduction to Machine Learning,” taught by a professor called Andrew Ng. He’d also emailed her a second time in a reply to his own email. 

_Rey,_

_Happy to answer questions if you have any after you’ve worked through the course. It’s very much worth your time._

_-Kylo_

Huh, thought Rey. What the hell.


	2. Kylo 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Kylo Ren assumes his new internet acquaintance is a man, has a terrible meeting, and gives an uncomfortable talk to his work colleagues.

Kylo Ren broke into a cold, guilty sweat as he hit send. He knew, knew, knew that he was not supposed to socialize with human raters. It was one of those things considered so thoroughly taboo that he wasn’t sure why he even knew it was; it felt like he had been born knowing that users of human eval data at First Order don’t talk to raters and certainly don’t send raters more information about how machine learning works. Talk about asking for biased data. He may as well have hung a sign on his back. “Bias my data, really bias the shit out of it.” Ugh. He’d have to check to make sure the rater’s contract was up soon.

The worst part was he couldn’t even really say why he’d done it. This rater was annoying. He’d called him ‘bro’ like some sort of...chum. Kylo hadn’t had a chum since the W. Bush administration.

In any case, his calendar was jumping up and down in the corner of his screen, begging him to leave now for a meeting two long, uncomfortably warm skybridges away. He was going to be late if he got coffee on the way. And Kylo was going to get some fucking coffee on the way, and woe to those who tried to stop him.

\-- 

Kylo slid into his meeting room as the door swung shut, and spilled coffee on his hand and the recycled wool carpet. “Well done, Ren,” Hux sneered. “Glad you could join us.” Hux was the worst. Snoke was on videoconference from his place in Jackson Hole, as usual, but his mic was muted and he was clearly having another conversation with someone colocated with him.

“Thanks, me too,” Kylo replied breezily, narrowing his eyes at Hux. “Looked at your experimental model, the one we talked about in last week’s sync, on my way over. Shame about that .7% precision loss. And no corresponding recall gain, ouf. Well, that’s life in research, you win some, you lose some.” He shook his head, all sarcastic sympathy. Hux’s cheeks stained pink. 

“Indeed,” Hux said through his teeth as Snoke, the CEO and chairman of the board of First Order Inc, looked between them on the big screen at the front of the room. “Well, _your_ -”

“Are you children finished?” Snoke interrupted, apparently done with his other conversation. 

“Hux obviously wasn’t,” Kylo said sweetly. “What were you about to say about my work, _Armitage_? Something about the numbers? That digit detection model with the reengineered features you thought wasn’t a good use of my time last week is looking just _peachy_ in production. Here, let me share the dashboard, it’s really - ” He made as if to open his laptop.  

“Enough,” Snoke snarled. “Get a room, you morons. I’d like this meeting to be five minutes or fewer, I’m double booked for a call with Maracaibo in ten. Status updates on Starkiller. Hux. Go.” 

“As Ren mentioned, the targeting model improvements I thought were promising didn’t pan out as hoped. I’m analyzing the results now, but planning to roll back to his model from a few weeks ago. My team is blitzing through the P1s on the burndown chart. Despite the model setback I still believe we’ll have something releasable in six weeks, eight at the outside.”

“Ren.”

“Digits production ready waiting on signoff from counsel. Moving vehicles in production now. Target acquisition in test with raters but early numbers look positive. If product would stick to product and stop bothering me about models they lack the expertise to suggest modifications to, I think I’d be ready to ship today.”

“If you would stop needling him about how much smarter you are than he is, he wouldn’t waste so much time and energy trying to prove you wrong. Hux, I don’t trust Ren with so much as an intern, for good reason. Look at him, the boy is a mess. Can’t enter a room without fucking up the carpet or setting fire to the drapes. There’s a reason we never let him meet customers. On the other hand, your ridiculous stack of Ivy League degrees notwithstanding, Ren can run fucking rings around you intellectually and you both know it. If you’d just stay in your fucking lane we’d be testing in Venezuela now like we’d planned, instead of still in simulation. Stick with your strengths, you idiots.” Snoke cut the video call, leaving the men alone in a room with his words echoing in their ears. 

“Everyone says you wear black all the time so it doesn’t show when you spill coffee on yourself,” Hux said without any spaces between the words as he turned tail and dashed out of the room. Ren’s paper cup, still one-third full of now-lukewarm coffee, hit the door as it swung shut again, missing Hux entirely. Kylo wasn’t sure if he’d missed intentionally or not. It wasn’t necessarily a fun HR conversation when you _didn’t_ miss, and there was a reason the cleaning crew all hated him, but it was so satisfying to score a direct hit. Ah, well.

Snoke had this amazing way of paying a compliment so it made you feel really bad about yourself. Kylo felt his inability to do this was one of the main things standing in the way of his advancement in the corporate world. When Kylo Ren had an insult in his heart he just had to sing it out as it wanted to be sung. He never thought to couch it in a compliment to make sure the recipient let his guard down. That way the insult could really hit home. It was so rare for Snoke to say anything positive, and so painfully, perfectly _Snoke_ that the context of the compliment was going to cost Kylo a bunch of sleep tonight. You never got a compliment you could just enjoy, not at First Order. Positive feedback was for liberal arts majors and little girls. 

Kylo looked down at his phone. He had meetings for the next four hours. It was going to be a long motherfucking day. 

\--

“hay sup,” came the chat on Kylo’s phone as he sat grouchily on the toilet in his private restroom at work a few days later. Kylo had spent those days being terribly unproductive, closing bugs as “won’t fix - working as intended”, reading LinkedIn recruitment messages, and chickening out of sending any of the replies he composed to send back to the recruiters. Snoke’s vicious burn had left him thinking about his future at First Order and he wasn’t sure he liked where it was headed. 

Of course it was all fucking fantasy. He couldn’t leave. He didn’t know how. He’d been at First Order for too long. He was practically the public face of the First Order AI “Division” which, let’s be real, was 85% just him. Apparently not because he was devastatingly competent, as he’d tended to privately assume, but because he was too much of a mess to have an intern, let alone a department. He would never actually leave this stupid, evil, stupid company. 

And hell, being at First Order had its charms. You want to change the world? At First Order, you change the world. No questions, no caveats. It was still heady to contemplate at a more abstract level, even if the day to day was shit.

“I thought I blocked this account.”

“lol u blocked the old one that was twins w yrs but since you scored me one thats my actual name i got another chance! thx d00d. pls dont block this one.”

“You’re welcome. I will almost certainly block this one.”

“nuuuu cmon srsly i wanna ask u some questions about machine learning can i?? i watched a couple of the video lectures in that course but bro i think it’s a little past my training.”

Kylo rolled his eyes. No shit. “Well, it’s pretty advanced stuff. How far are you in your degree?”

The little dots appeared to indicate that Rey was typing, stopping, typing again, stopping.

“not very.”

“Never too early to start learning though. Tell me more about your class.”

“welllll it’s an intro class. i mean im really new at this.”

“Wait, it’s September. So you’re, what, a couple weeks into your computer science education? Are you even writing any code yet?”

“not even a couple weeks lol like 4 days. ive been reading ahead a bit, pretty into it so far. started doing some of the easier project euler problems to see how far i can get. im aluminumfalcon on github if u wanna look!”

Kylo laughed out loud. It was fairly impressive that a person with a couple days’ worth of programming experience had been enterprising enough to start writing code for a personal project and back it up online, but he fully expected to see six lines of weirdly indented nonsense when he opened the link. 

The laugh stopped in his throat as he started clicking through the source files the rater had uploaded. He had hundreds of lines of tidy, competently written Python. This looked better than code he’d seen from interview candidates finishing up their bachelor’s degrees. “Jeez, man, have you slept in the last 4 days?”

“probs not as much as i should lol!! theyre startin 2 know my name at the college computer lab already ahaha but im having a really good time!”

“I have to say, I wasn’t expecting this when someone who’s been programming for four days sent me his Github. You must have read way ahead. You sure you haven’t done this before?” 

“ya d00d lol i think id remember.”

The wheels in Kylo’s head began to turn. “Look, it’s probably very premature to make this kind of offer, but if you keep progressing this quickly, get in touch again as it gets closer to summer. I’ve got an internship with your name on it if you’re interested.” 

He’d show Snoke who could manage an intern.

“whut dang thanks bro but ya its a bit early. glad u didnt block me!! jeez it really is like fallin off a log getting a job once you can code i guess. rad!! but anyway how about that machine learning stuff??”

“All in good time, my young apprentice.”

“jeez straight palpatine up in this. ahaha coding rules!”

“Seriously, even if you aren’t available for an internship next summer, stay in touch. You’ve clearly got a lot of raw talent, and I know a lot of people. I can definitely offer you advice, introductions, that kind of stuff.” It was so refreshing for Kylo to encounter someone who didn’t already know who he was and exactly what they wanted from him.

“i totally appreciate that!! thanks bro. btw are you the guy from this article: http://www.wired.com/first-orders-kylo-ren-talks-autonomous-weapons-systems? or is that a different person named k ren at first order??”

Shit. Oh, shit. So much for the innocent anonymity he’d been enjoying in their exchange thus far. He was going to have to make sure Rey got taken off ALL rating tasks being used in Starkiller, because Rey now knew where his data was being used. And unfortunately, because Starkiller was six-going-on-eight months behind schedule due entirely to that meddling fucking ginger down the hall, most tasks being given rater budget were Starkiller tasks right now. Rey just wouldn’t get tapped to do tasks anymore. 

Kylo shrugged. Rey’s contract was up in a month, he’d checked, and it wasn’t like anyone was actually using the pittance raters were paid for anything more than beer money anyway. He closed the chat, ran down the hall to his office, and removed Rey from the rating pool entirely. 

He spent the rest of the afternoon poring over Rey’s Github. There was no way he could possibly be this good at Python after four days of study. The very idea was absurd. He had to have taken AP Computer Science or something, or gone to some long-ago computer camp to get a head start. Still, even if it wasn’t strictly true that this rater had some prodigious talent, the dude clearly had a solid head on his shoulders. Worth staying in touch. Probably worth not blocking on chat. 

Yet.

But probably also not worth replying directly to that identity question.

\--

“d00d weird qq probs not yr area but do u know what’s up w my task queue?? i havent gotten any rating tasks in like 5 days n im kinda starting to panic.”

Kylo was in a meeting, but he wasn’t presenting yet and wasn’t paying attention to the speaker. “Panic? Why?”

“ummm cause i didn’t exactly budget for a week of lost rating income…”

Kylo was not the sort of person who ever told lies when asked a direct question. 

“I had to take you out of the pool because it was clear your ratings were going to be influenced by the fact that you knew some of the applications we’re working on. I shouldn’t ever have replied to you.”

“wtf.”

“Sorry about that. My fault.”

“i mean i dont even know what you mean by influenced rly but is there anything u can do? my contract term is just one more month and then i have to take a whole year off but in the meantime my budget assumed id have those couple hundred dollars.”

Kylo paused. He wasn’t sure he understood the feeling he was having. Was it guilt? He’d done nothing wrong. Sympathy? He literally just parked his Tesla wherever and paid for parking tickets after the fact; he couldn’t remember a time when a month’s worth of rating income had meant much to him at all. This whole situation felt stupid and ridiculous. Still, he felt some prickling in his temples that made him open a new tab and check the rater management UI to see if he could do anything for Rey. 

“OK, reload. You’re lucky you know so many languages. It’s not a full load but it’s something.” 

“omg thank you thank you thank you!!!!! literally saved my life.”

“How’s your class?”

“sloooow. i basically just go to class so theyll keep letting me in the computer lab but whatevs its worth it i guess. check out my github its getting pretty legit. ”

Kylo had been checking it daily, annoyed and delighted by turns at how quickly and impressively Rey was growing as a programmer. He didn’t push more code every day, but when he did the improvement from the previous commit was visible each time. It made Kylo wish he could even remember the first time he’d written code; he’d grown up in a house of coders, not that dad ever went near a console but between mom and Uncle Luke Kylo reckoned he’d probably written code before English. Certainly he’d used Scratch before he could even read.

“Not bad, padawan. Nice recursion in fibonacci_helper.py!”

“lol u dork. hold up i thought we were sith whats this padawan stuff.”

“Ooh, you caught me, mixing my alignments. Got to go.” It was about to be his turn to present for the new members of the security team, and he needed his screen to be free of chats from a person whose typing style was decidedly less than professional. 

“l8r bro.”

Kylo closed the window, logged out of chat entirely just in case, and opened up his presentation. He addressed the men sitting around the table, all of whom looked appropriately intimidated to be in the presence of the notoriously temperamental Managing Director of Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining. In a company of tens of thousands, it was unlikely they would have another encounter with someone who reported directly to the CEO anytime soon. Everyone in the conference room was aware of that fact, and Kylo tried to come across like a Very Important But Also Normal and Down-to-earth Executive. This was never a very natural role for him to play.

“Welcome to First Order. We’re very happy to have you. Security is a key component of what we do and how we run; your organization has saved us from existential threats before and you’ll do it again.

“I’m here today to do a briefing for you. How many of you have heard of the Resistance?” Most of the hands in the room went up.

“Good. I’ve been personally involved in hardening our systems and policies against this hacker organization since I joined this company over ten years ago. The Resistance has been a source of profound annoyance for First Order’s technical development since the foundation of the company.”

He advanced a slide, revealing the mug shot of a white-haired man. 

“Most recently, we took well known security researcher turned vigilante Lor San Tekka to court over stolen, highly classified geo data he acquired from an airgapped colo by spearfishing a contractor who worked in a mapping and topography QA group. Thanks to our crack legal team, he’s now in federal prison. But it was a ridiculous pain in the ass trying to piece together how it all happened, and we had to work with the FBI and eventually the CIA and Interpol to find him and extradite him back to the US, and we never did get that data back. He’d put a screw through the hard drive when we found it.

“These are the kind of people we’re dealing with. I know it’s easy to see hackers as all of a tribe. That’s the culture in security, I know that as well as anyone. You mingle with black hats at Defcon, watching talks all day and owning machines all night. But now that you’re at First Order, you’ve got to really grok deep in your bones that you’re a different kind of target now. These people are actually dangerous, and they will stop at nothing if we don’t stop them first.”

One of the members of the security team raised a hand. “I’ll confess, I’ve read up on the Resistance, and there’s something I just don’t understand. Why are they so obsessed with First Order in particular? There are dozens of companies in this space. Hell, why wouldn’t they be going after the governments buying our products?”

Kylo smirked. “Well, we’re the best, aren’t we?” The room laughed. “I’m mostly not kidding! If you want to disrupt worldwide progress in smart weapons research, there are a handful of companies worth targeting. If there were a better target, I’d be working there and so would you. And you take on a much more powerful target when you go after a government. A government has a police force. They run the courts. We don’t. You and your colleagues form our primary defense against the Resistance.

“Any other questions? Great. For the rest of this talk we’ll do a brief lesson on the history of the Resistance, the key players, and signs you might be dealing with a Resistance operative. Raise your hand if you need any clarification or have questions. I’ll get through this as quickly as I can, I know Phasma has a huge deck she needs to get through for the rest of the hour.”

Kylo had given this talk once a quarter for the last five years. He knew it like the back of his hand. It was an almost masochistic exercise, going over his own family’s history so impersonally, but he didn’t trust anyone else with it. He also suspected that it gave Snoke sadistic pleasure to know he was doing this, because he’d once mentioned that he didn’t think it was that useful of a talk and Snoke had made a disapproving grimace and Kylo had never brought it up again.

“So, the Resistance has been around in one form or another since First Order was just a twinkle in Dr Snoke’s eye. A number of like-minded hippies all met in the MIT AI Lab in the early 70s and called themselves the Rebellion. They were instrumental in ending a number of weapons programs, mostly through illegal means, then went underground for most of the Reagan years to regroup and, we believe, come up with a plan to end nuclear proliferation.” And get married, start families, that sort of crap. Not that that was worth mentioning. “As the Cold War ended, the group fell apart, believing that history had ended or whatever. I don’t know, I was in grade school at the time.” The security geeks seated around the table chuckled; from the looks of them, most of them hadn’t been born yet. “Some went into academia, others to industry, others still went underground.

“The group reformed after 9/11 to fight the Patriot Act and mount legal challenges related to drone warfare, but they’ve had less success in court than they did in the 70s, and they’ve grown increasingly desperate. We believe they aren’t above actual violence. A few of the original group’s members led the charge to reconvene, but they’ve recruited some younger members as well.”

Now came the worst part. Kylo rotated through slides of his mom, his dad, his uncle. Of Poe Dameron, a boy he’d played Ninja Turtles with in simpler times, who’d grown into an unfairly sexy older man. Of Auntie Amilyn, of Uncle Ackbar. And of people his age, people younger than him, people who in some other, different life, might have been friends, lovers, at least allies. All of them, now, considered him to be one of the most evil living humans; the feeling was only somewhat mutual. 

They were deeply misguided, certainly. Evil? He wasn’t sure. 

He deplored their tactics and abhorred their ideological stance. If he had the chance to put one of them in prison, he’d take it. He’d changed his name to dissociate himself from them. It made him feel ashamed that he was related to people who seemed so thoroughly anti-progress. It was an inevitability that humans would always be at war with other humans; autonomous weapons, once perfected, would make war less dangerous. Friendly fire would be a thing of the past; collateral damage could follow, further along. More advanced countries were glimpsing a future in which they could shrink and possibly, someday, eliminate their standing armies. Wasn’t that a social good? All those young people doing something more productive, edifying, and uplifting than learning how to kill one another?

“These are the leaders of the Resistance as far as we know right now. If you’re approached by people who look like any of these individuals, at a conference, on the First Order campus, or even in your own neighborhood, exercise extreme caution. Some of them have been tricking hapless nerds out of their passwords since before you were born. If you have even a hint of suspicion that you’ve been contacted by one of them, get in touch with Phasma immediately. If she’s not available, take it straight to me.”

“Mr Ren, are you formally part of the security organization? Why would we get you involved?”

Kylo smiled grimly. “I have my reasons. Call it a passion project.” He closed his laptop and left the room. 


	3. Rey 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey gets a strange new job.

As Rey stood to leave the computer lab, after a brief but productive homework session with Finn, her phone buzzed. When she glanced at it, she froze. “Shit,” she said, forgetting where she was for a second.

“Everything okay, Rey?”

“Oh, um. Yes,” she said, still distracted as she got her wallet out and started riffling through the cash inside. “Peachy.”

“You know, at my job I think they’ve been looking for an undergrad to help out with a research project,” he said, reading her not-at-all-subtle money-freakout body language. “Probably freshman or sophomore level skills needed. Think you might be able to handle it.” 

“Oh, you know, I’m very busy, I have a couple jobs - ” Rey said absently as she made as if to walk out.

“22 bucks an hour, they were saying…could afford up to 30 hours a week on this grant if you can make the time...asked me if I knew anybody...”

Rey stopped short. “Are you fu - are you kidding me? An hour?!”

“You know that’s bargain basement for a good coder, right? And I barely get a chance to do any of our homework because you just start typing and it’s done. What do you say?”

“I say sign me up! Can _you_ hire me? What do you even do there anyway?”

“Don’t you want to know what you’d be working on?”

“I don’t think you understand the lengths I’d go to make that kind of bank.” Rey’s usually reserved demeanor melted away as she contemplated a future of significantly less penury.

“I think I might,” Finn said with a nod. “But come back to the office and meet the crew before you sign your name. This isn’t your everyday code monkey job.”

Once they were well out of earshot of the computer science building, Finn started talking again. “So. Um. Do you have any strong...political feelings, Rey?”

“Not really. I try to stay informed and vote when I can, but I’m a busy woman.” 

“I’m not really thinking about party politics. I mean, do you have big ideas about what kind of world this should be? About how people should treat each other, about who should and shouldn’t have money, about how wars should be fought and won, or whether they should be fought at all?”

Rey thought for a second. “I’d say most of those questions are above my pay grade. But of course I’m of the opinion that I ought to have a lot more money,” she joked. 

“Sure,” Finn replied, clearly not well satisfied with this answer. 

“Look, Finn, I can tell you’re trying to ask a much more specific question and I wish you’d just ask it.” 

Finn sighed. “Yeah, I guess I’m no good at this sort of ‘do you want to be in the Matrix or what’ kind of speech. Okay. Have you ever heard of the Rebellion?”

“Like, the hacker collective, from the 70s? They made the JEDI OS and gave it away for free? Of course, everyone’s heard of them. Our computer lab runs FORCE windowing manager. It says RESIST all across the screen when you boot them.” 

“Right, sure. But like, would you _join_ the Rebellion?”

Rey scoffed. “Oh, right, and hack alongside Luke Skywalker in some dank basement? Sounds great, do you have a time machine?”

“I thought it sounded crazy too. But Rey, they’re still around. They’re trying to come back, calling themselves the Resistance, fighting the same fight. I’m working with them, and actually so is Poe - Professor Dameron, I mean. That’s how I ended up taking the class, to try and learn more about the tech side. I’m no coder but - well, I can tell you more once you decide if you’re going to work with us or not. I think they’re doing good stuff. They’ve helped me out a lot.”

“I mean, I guess to the extent that I know anything about them they seem to be...okay sorts? I don’t know what you want from me here, Finn. I’ve never left the five boroughs, I look at a newspaper once a month or so. I’m not a change-the-world kind of girl. But of course I want to do the right thing.”

Finn opened up a low gate on a walk that led into a crumbling brownstone. “Is this their office?” Rey asked skeptically. “It looks a bit...residential, don’t you think?”

“It’s one of their offices. Come on, don’t dilly-dally.” He waved her through the front door.

A man with craggy good looks was wielding tweezers and a visibly smoking soldering iron in his right hand, a magnifying glass in his left, and a flashlight in his mouth. Somehow, around it, he managed to say, “Finn. Does your phone have a flashlight? Do you see a capacitor anywhere in here?” He gestured with his chin at the open computer chassis in front of him.

“A capacitor?” Finn asked, clearly unsure what the word meant.

“It’s a small...brown...item. Very small.”

Rey peered in. “There’s one,” she said, licking her fingertip to grab the miniscule component. “Sheesh, these are tiny. You soldering these by hand, at your age? Seems like it’d be easier to use a scope than hold a magnifying glass.” 

“You offering me a scope, kid? Thanks,” he said, grabbing the capacitor off her finger with the tweezers. “I don’t recall asking your opinion on my methods. Or my age, for that matter. Who are you, anyway?”

“I’m Rey.”

“Well, Rey, I’ve been doing this a long time and I have never yet found I needed a scope.”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself. I didn’t catch your name.” 

The man looked up, wiped his hand on his visibly grimy black vest, and held it out to shake. “Han Solo.” 

Rey’s mouth dropped open as she shook his hand. “You’re Han Solo. _The_ Han Solo? Oh my god, I still have one of those low-cost laptops you and the Democratic Computing Initiative built for poor kids in New York! That thing is still ticking! I’ve swapped in a new hard drive, new RAM, had to replace the touchpad but it still flies, fourteen years after they handed them out at the Boys and Girls Club! What a design. So easy to open up and tinker but it could take tremendous abuse. I used it as a blunt weapon more than once. Never actually tested if it was bulletproof but I’d bet money it was. I don’t use it these days but it’s just because I couldn’t figure out a way to get wifi in there without replacing that custom low-power motherboard. Wow, I never dreamed I’d really meet you. I owe you, big time.”

“Where’d you find this girl, Finn? I like her.” 

“She’s my homework partner in Poe’s class.” That was by far the most he’d ever heard Rey say at a time, and he’d been doing homework with her for weeks.

“Ah, the one who’s ensuring you don’t actually get to write a line of code?” Han looked her up and down. “Well, I for one vote she can stay. Even if she can’t code her way out of a paper bag it sounds like I could probably use her in the electronics shop.” 

“I _can_ code,” Rey bristled. “Can and will.” 

“By all means,” Han said, hands raised in a gesture of compliance. “But if you ever find yourself itching to pick up a soldering iron…”

Rey hated electronics work, especially the sort of fine work Han was doing. She’d been put to work in the pawn shop many times over the years, replacing hard drives and otherwise tinkering with electronics of questionable provenance to make them harder to trace. She’d definitely had enough of that kind of work for one lifetime, and Plutt always made her do it because his fingers were too fat to handle the delicate components. Still, it paid. Sometimes.

“I think the code guys called dibs on her first, Han,” Finn said with a smile. 

“But thanks for the offer, I’ll keep it in mind,” Rey clarified politely. No sense burning a bridge when there might be money on the other side.

“C’mon, Poe and the coders work upstairs,” Finn said, beckoning her up. 

They ascended the spiral staircase and emerged into a room that looked very much like a poorly-kept undergrad computer lab. Computers and peripherals were piled on every surface. A half-dozen young men were working on computers with headphones on. Professor Dameron was working in the corner and smiled over his shoulder as Finn and Rey walked in. 

“Rey! I’m glad Finn finally figured out how to ask you to come meet us.” 

“Uh, yes. He mentioned you might be willing to pay me $22 an hour to write code?” 

Professor Dameron shot a radiant grin at Finn. “Not a bad angle, I guess. Not quite the ideological slant I was hoping for, though.” 

“I’m not a political person. But I am very strongly of the opinion that it’s excellent to be able to pay one’s rent. And I am a _huge_ Han Solo fangirl since lunch money days, so.” 

“Hey, it’s a start. Let’s talk in the office.” Professor Dameron got up and picked his way across the crowded room. He led Rey and Finn into a crowded little room with framed newspaper pages hanging on the walls from the glory days of the Resistance. “‘Hacker’ Group Strikes Fear Into Hearts of Defense Giants,” from the Washington Post in the 1970s. “Victory For Rebellion as No-Nuke Cause Grows,” from the New York Times in the 1980s. “Resistance’s Skywalker To Found ‘College of the Future’,” from the Boston Globe, 1995. 

Professor Dameron pulled the door shut. “Okay. First off, I would get in huge trouble if I were known to be recruiting students for something like this. I need to be very clear here: Finn was responsible for bringing you here. Correct? Now that you’re in the door, I am talking to you. But the person who recruited you to the cause was Finn. Not me. Agreed?”

“Yes,” Rey said, increasingly suspicious about the $22/hour.

“But now that you are here, I’d like to tell you a little bit more about our organization. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Rebellion to some extent, from history or pop culture. But are you familiar with what we’re up to now?”

“Honestly, I thought the whole thing died off in the 90s. I guess, come to think of it, around the time that headline came out,” she said, pointing to the one about Skywalker’s college. “Whatever happened with that?” 

“It didn’t go in the direction Luke hoped,” Professor Dameron said in a tone that indicated no more would be said on the topic. “The Rebellion had a tough time with the End of History. Once the Berlin Wall came down, people didn’t want to think about nuclear arsenals anymore. They tried renaming themselves but it didn’t really take. And after 9/11 there was a real ‘with us or against us’ period where it was very hard to make any headway with a general public that was largely sympathetic with the aim of stamping out terrorism by any means necessary.” He rolled his eyes. “But now - well, there are a few interesting opportunities for us to bend the arc of history.”

Rey felt entirely out of her depth. “I’m not sure where I come in.”

“Sure. So right now we’re taking a few different approaches to try to influence policy. The first is with Finn - legal stuff. But we’re also looking at trying to slow weapons development. That’s where you come in. I’m hoping we can come up with bots to feed bad data into the various platforms that weapons makers use to gather training data.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow. Training data for what?”

Poe smacked his forehead. “Yes, I am definitely too deep into my own expertise here. Sorry. Backing up. Right now, the Resistance is very concerned that major defense contractors are competing for federal contracts to make autonomous weapons. We think that’s a bell humanity won’t be able to unring. We’re building a court case around Finn and his experiences with drone piloting in the Air Force, but we’re also considering a number of technical approaches to make weapons hard to build.”

Rey’s head spun as she put the pieces together. What kind of coincidence was this? “This is crazy, Professor Dameron! My contract as a rater for First Order is still active! I’m making money right now doing these rating tasks.”

“No _way_.”

“Well, right now I’m only getting translation tasks.” For some reason she omitted to mention why she’d been taken off the other tasks. “And I’ll lose access to the rating console when my contract expires in a week. But I certainly _have_ spent the last several months doing those exact rating tasks. I’m not sure you could bot them, though.” 

“Maybe not the ones you were doing. Those have a pretty significant screening process. But there are a bunch of lower-cost services they use to get validation and test data in volume. Wow, unreal that you’ve actually done these rating jobs before! Say, I wonder if we could use your login to poke around the rating tool before your login stops working and see if we can find any vulnerabilities?”

“Sure thing, Professor Dameron,” she grinned.

“You’re going to have to call me Poe under this roof,” he replied with feigned severity. “So do you think you’d be interested in learning more about some of the other services and figuring out how to automate wrong or random answers? We’re hoping to poison their data stream and lower their confidence in their solutions. The idea being that each month we delay release of their weapons systems buys us time to push Finn’s case through the legal system.”

“Poe, I probably have an account with every single one of the services you’re looking at. This is a big part of how I’ve fed myself for the last few years.” Her mind was racing, thinking about all the human eval systems she’d used. “If you can provide fake identifying information for new accounts that will get past their legal work filters, I already have a few ideas.”

“Looks like we picked the right person. And by the way, I really can pay you $22 an hour if that’s what it takes to get you through the door.”

“I - ” Rey hesitated. Part of her wanted to say, “No, money isn’t necessary, you all seem like lovely people and your cause feels just and righteous,” but that part was not generally allowed to speak. “Look, between you and me, I really and truly cannot pay my rent this month. I would very much like to be in a position to do work for inspiring ideological reasons, but I just can’t. If that’s a problem I’d very much appreciate -”

“No, no, not a problem!” Poe waved a hand. “Coders don’t ever come for free. We’ve got you covered. I’ll tack on a signing bonus to get you through the end of the month, say, $1000?” he winked.

Rey was glad she was already sitting down. “Sounds acceptable,” she replied weakly. 

“Great! Let me get you a workstation set up. You can have Chewie’s desk, he never uses it.” 

As Poe began bustling around, assembling the machine and peripherals she’d need to get work done in the office, Rey tried to get her head around what had just happened. What were the odds that she’d go from a rater paid pennies per task to communicating with one of the lead engineers on the project by pure happenstance, then weeks later find herself taking a paid job literally just making trouble for him? 

And why hadn’t she mentioned him, anyway? It made her a little uncomfortable to think about it, so she stopped.

She busied herself connecting cables and plugging things in. When her machine was up and running she asked Poe if he wanted to take a look at the rating tool. “Of course!” he said. “But use Tor Browser, I’m sure they are looking for traffic from us.” 

“I don’t know what that is,” she said. 

“Tor Browser sort of bounces your request around the internet on the way to its destination so the recipient can’t trace it back to us. We use it for most of our browsing here. It’s slow, but you can’t be too careful. I’ll start it up.” A few seconds later he asked her to log into the tool. “Wow, what a piece of junk!” he laughed. “This UI looks like someone wrote it over a long weekend. In 2006.”

“Well, that’s probably not far off,” she said. “They pay their users, so it’s not like anyone’s complaining. As long as it’s up and I can do my tasks I don’t care how it looks.” 

“Point taken,” Poe said, firing up a half-dozen debugging tools to learn as much about the tool, the network traffic it was sending and receiving, the APIs it was calling, and the UI frameworks it was using as he could. He took notes in surprisingly neat handwriting on a notebook he balanced on his knees.

“Is that pizza?” Rey asked, certain that the item she was pointing to was pizza. 

“Help yourself,” Poe waved her off without looking up.

Rey was always up for free food, and felt fairly weird about giving these guys access to her First Order account, recalling the many things she had signed about confidentiality and secrecy and scary law stuff for those who failed to comply. She felt it was somehow less bad if she didn’t actually watch Professor Dameron - Poe, that was going to be a strange transition - violating her NDA. She supposed if she had access to anything First Order cared about protecting, they’d have paid her a living wage to give her some incentive to hold up her side of the deal. Which they never had.

Finn had been reading on his phone and noticed her eating. “Where did you find pizza?” he asked. Rey pointed it out and he helped himself to two slices of pepperoni. They stood next to each other, eating in silence. 

“It’s a little weird.”

“What is?” Rey asked.

“Working with these guys. It’s weird. I know you’re feeling it too.”

“I’ve always just kept my head down and tried to survive. I never saw myself involved with this kind of thing.”

“Oh, me too. Absolutely. I’m no revolutionary.”

“How’d you get involved with this anyway? You’re not a cheap community-college coder, how’d you get pulled into it?”

“Ugh. Long story short, they’re building a legal case around my military contract. Long story long, I probably shouldn’t talk about it because I don’t really understand it. Senator Organa is supposed to be some kind of legal genius but half the time when she asks me a question I have no idea why it’s relevant.”

“ _Senator_?” Rey squeaked.

“Well, not any more, obviously. Aren’t you supposed to call former senators ‘Senator’?”

“I can’t even convey to you the extent to which I haven’t the faintest idea.” 

“Anyway, she’s a full time annoyance to the federal government now, I guess, but she used to be a senator. Everybody here mostly calls her Leia but I feel - I mean I just got out of the Air Force a few weeks ago, I can’t just call a former senator by her first name. I don’t know how to do that.”

“I hear you. Air Force, huh? I considered it.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Lots of things.” Rey regretted bringing it up. “But mostly I just couldn’t bring myself to leave Queens.”

“Rey, I’m all done with your account,” Poe called from across the room. 

“All right, go ahead and log out. There’s a link where you’d expect it to be. Find anything useful?”

“Nothing earth-shattering, but I didn’t expect to. But there are a few things I can tinker with that I didn’t know about before, and even just knowing how they expect raters to interact with data is a big help. Too bad you didn’t have any imagery tasks though! My guys on the inside are telling me it’s basically 95% of what they’re throwing the rater pool at right now. Do you have any idea why you aren’t getting those? Were you recruited just for translation?”

“No, I used to get imagery tasks. Translation pays a little better so I haven’t been too mad about it. Who knows why First Order does anything, though.” She narrowed her eyes bitterly, thinking of Kylo Ren and the arbitrary way he’d knocked out so much of her monthly income that she’d found herself taking a job messing up his life. Served him right. Maybe.

“Ain’t that the truth. Okay, we have a little site you can use to get instructions to set up your dev environment, make accounts, and so forth. Here’s a timesheet. They’re due every other Friday and I’ll cut your check in QuickBooks once you turn it in. Let me get you that bonus I promised you.” Rey wiggled involuntarily due to an excess of glee. A thousand dollars, all at once! 

\-- 

The following day was a Saturday. Rey went to the library to pick up a few more rating tasks and had a sudden thought. She logged into her First Order email account. 

“u there bro,” she sent to Kylo Ren.

“Yes. What’s up?”

“workin saturday? ouch.”

“I get my work chats on my phone. But as a matter of fact, yes, I am working today.”

“well my rater contract is up in a few days and i just figured i better give u my contact info in case u still wanted an intern next summer.”

“Yeah, thanks. Your Github is looking better every week. I’m looking forward to seeing what you do with it.”

“imma do less now on it cause i actually got a coding job! so if u see me doing less on there dont worry im not losing interest. just 2 busy gettin PAID son.”

“Oh, congratulations! Where are you working?”

“just some research stuff for a prof nbd. but def pays better than rating.”

“I bet. Good for you.”

“thx!! anyway im kirarey1992@gmail.com hit me up anytime. u could totes just ping me on chat anytime too.”

There was a long pause. “If you get bounced by the corp filter and you want to get ahold of me, try kylomorphism@gmail.com.”


	4. Kylo 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey's ungodly programming prowess rears its terrible head.

It had not occurred to Kylo until that very second that Rey might not be a man. He hadn’t even bothered to look up the rater’s full name in the corporate directory. But _Kira_ Rey sounded like a chick, right? 

And so, in a moment of impulsive weakness, he had given Rey his personal email, his real personal email, not the one he gave to recruiters or the one he used to sign up for websites, the one his _mom_ had (not that he'd heard from her in years). Because when a probable girl asks for your contact info, and you work an 80-hour-a-week job at a company that’s 90% male, the correct answer is “here it is, yes, please contact me in any way you like.”

Then like 30 seconds later he’d remembered how quickly Rey had picked up Python and was filled with a number of conflicting emotions. 

Part of him was incredulous that a woman had started programming so competently, so quickly; in his experience, women could generally be reasonably competent programmers but they were almost never _impressive_. That wasn’t to say that such a thing was impossible, but it definitely felt less than likely. It definitely wasn’t a conclusion one just _leapt_ to.

This train of thought was interrupted by a sudden erection so painfully hard he groaned aloud at his desk at the idea that perhaps the person who wrote that code starting four days into an intro programming class might actually have a vagina, and maybe even tits. 

And then he calmed down that whole mess of a situation by reminding himself that in the highly unlikely event that quick, competent, obnoxious, friendly Rey was in fact of the female persuasion the probability that she was even _slightly_ hot was so vanishingly low as to be not worth considering. A strong, intuitive girl programmer who persistently kept acting like she liked him and wanted to interact with him had to be defective in some visually obvious way.

Then he lost a whole bunch of his morning to trying to find anyone named Kira Rey or any of a dozen likely variations on that name on social media, and failing, and getting more and more frustrated. In this day and age it was unheard of to just _not exist_ on the internet in this inexplicable way. What was Rey’s deal? Who was she? Her github username wasn’t used anywhere else. There were zero hits on Google matching her email address. How was this even _possible_. 

Kylo Ren was a problem solver, though. Kylo Ren had been using the internet for a very long time, and he hadn’t always hung out with the nicest crowd. If Kylo Ren wanted to find a person, he knew just how deep he could go, and she’d given him plenty to work with. But he wasn’t going to do it on First Order’s network, and he did have work to do as evidenced by his presence at the office on a Saturday, so he got down to it and tabled the sleuthing.

\--

The day had been more productive and more pleasurable than he’d expected. He’d written a test harness for some drone firmware that a contractor had been punting on for weeks, and had then terminated said contractor’s contract without so much as a phone call, with savage, grim satisfaction. Sometimes it was nice to just get your hands dirty with some really basic code, and then fire the guy who’d failed to write it. But ultimately at this point everything about Starkiller was blocked on Hux’s team, a fact which was probably responsible for a good deal of his good mood. Anytime Hux suffered, Kylo could feel okay about just about anything else that was going on. So it was even nicer that this had been Hux’s contractor, whom Hux had personally recruited and hired, to do this one exact job. Kylo had done this job, which said contractor had dithered on for four months, in the space of three hours on a Saturday.

So it was with no small joy that he prepared for a 4pm sync with Snoke and Hux. Hux was onsite with the team in Provo, Utah and Snoke was waking up early from China. Kylo’s models were outperforming the benchmarks they’d set for release readiness, the perf grid looked entirely green, the only thing lacking was the rest of the software that would sit between his perfect models and the devices that would use those models to make kill decisions. 

Kylo dialed into the videoconference early, sipping black coffee, wearing black clothing. Snoke was already dialed in, dressed in a lavish gold bathrobe with his hotel’s logo on it, using a wide spoon to eat something white. “How are you this morning, Ren.” It wasn’t a question.

“Afternoon. I’m fine. How are you?”

“As well as anyone could be in a place where people consider seafood rice porridge to be an acceptable thing to serve a grown man for breakfast.”

There wasn’t much to say to that. Kylo settled for a deadpan “My condolences,” which elicited a bitter chuckle. “How does the hardware manufacturing site look? Everything on track?”

“Seems to be. I expect to have these generic units in the States within a couple weeks and then our guys in Michigan can do the classified work and ship to Venezuela overnight. If our ginger friend can get his people in line maybe we won’t lose this fucking gigantic contract.” Hux chose that moment to pop up on the VC. “So good of you to join us, Hux. We were just speculating about how your crunch is going.” 

“Very well,” Hux said. “We’re back on track. Getting facetime with the Provo team has been productive. We pushed past a lot of blockers this week.”

“Good. When do you think we can launch?”

“We’ll make the end of November unless anything unexpected comes up.”

“ _Good_ , Hux. This is the best news I’ve heard all month.” 

Kylo hated every minute of this conversation and didn’t know how to redirect it in a way that wasn’t about how effective a leader Hux was. So he opted for silence.

“Ren, any news?”

“Nope. I wrote a test harness for the VX-397 this morning.”

Hux looked surprised. “Wasn’t Sibar Treim working on that?”

“I terminated his contract once I’d finished it. He’d been putzing around for four months and it took me three hours.” 

“You terminated his - ” Hux took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “Very well. I agree, he was hired to write that and if he wasn’t up to the task, thank you for taking it on. I know that kind of work is not your typical thing, and you must have really needed those tests running.”

“Indeed.” The victory felt pyrrhic. No, he hadn’t. He’d just wanted to fuck with Hux, and look how unperturbed Hux appeared to be.

“Look at you boys. Nobody’s yelled, nobody’s thrown anything. Working together like the generals you were born to be. Keep it up,” Snoke said, and cut the call without a goodbye.

“Don’t fire my people, Ren,” Hux said. “I don’t fire - oh, dear, you don’t have any people. Hmm. Well, if you ever manage to recruit a subordinate I won’t fire him. I’ll make a note of it.” 

“Don’t hire incompetents and I won’t have to fire them,” Kylo said, leaving the call so he could get the last word in.

He grabbed his laptop and headed home. He had some internet stalking to do.

\-- 

Kylo’s condo was not a space that said much about who he was. It was in a new building in Mission Bay, it was a lot roomier than he needed, and it was not decorated with any particular style or pizzazz. Half a dozen not-yet-opened Amazon boxes sat by the door at any given time. 

Kylo opened his refrigerator, which contained two containers of Chinese takeout, a dozen or so bottles of local craft beer, a jar of dijon mustard, a tube of wasabi, a jar of olives, three eggs, and a few boxes of protein drinks. On weekends, he mostly lived on protein drinks; on weekdays he had three square meals for free at the office. He opened up the Chinese, unsure of when it was from, took a whiff, closed his eyes and shook his head, and closed the container again, returning it to the refrigerator. Protein drink it was.

Researching Rey wasn’t something he was particularly excited to do. Public records searches were tricky when one wasn’t sure of the subject’s legal name. Kira Rey seemed to be a dead end, despite that being the name in the corporate directory. What else did he know about Rey?

He took out a piece of paper and a pen and started writing.

  * Not much money  

  * Speaks English, French, Spanish, German, spoken but not written Russian, spoken but not written conversational Cantonese according to rater profile  

  * “Aluminumfalcon”? What the hell is an aluminum falcon  

  * Enrolled in programming class at night school  

  * Probably born 1992 given email  

  * Wicked smart, terrible grammar and spelling though?



Now that he looked at the list, it wasn’t much. He was surprised, going through their chat logs, to learn that he didn’t actually have any idea where she was located. He’d assumed she was from California for some reason, but based on the documentary evidence he had no reason to believe that.

Luckily, he knew where he could get more information. Because his pal Rey was an open book.

_To:_ _kirarey1992@gmail.com_

_From:_ _kylomorphism@gmail.com_

_Hello Rey,_

_I wanted to verify that this was the correct email address. Good luck with your new job. You’ll have to tell me more about it when you have the chance. How is class? Where did you say you went to school? I’m curious if we recruit from there._

_K_

He sent this terse email and went to watch _Alexander Nevsky_ on TCM, checking his phone every few minutes. Within an hour he got back:

_To: kylomorphism@gmail.com_

_From:_ _kirarey1992@gmail.com_

_Hey!! Job is chill so far the people seem nice. Im writing some python scripts to automate some tasks they do. Nothing too earth shatteing but it pays the BILL$!!! Amirite??? I doubt your company recruits from Queensborough Community College but that’s my school. It’s not very prestigious but Im learning a lot. Thanks for saying hello. Hope all is well w u._

_Rey_

Kylo scratched his head. Why had he thought California? Well, this was inconvenient, it was much more of a pain getting into public records outside his own state. Maybe he could make an excuse to take a trip to New York if the going got rough. Then perhaps he’d be able to meet her in person.

He stopped that thought in it tracks and walked around it, examining it. 

What was his aim here? What did this search represent to him? He had developed a dedicated mindfulness practice as part of a long-ago anger management course mandated by a compliance board at First Order following an unfortunate incident. While he hadn’t found it had any effect on his temper, when he wasn’t in over his head in a blinding rage it did help him reflect on his motivations a bit, and such reflection seemed more than usually warranted. He tried to step through his past few hours with a debugger, looking at variables, setting checkpoints.

Before yesterday, he thought, I was interested in Rey. I was interested in Rey as a potential protege. I was interested in Rey as a person who was entirely outside of First Order, who barely even knew what First Order was. Someone who wasn’t from tech, who isn’t in SF, who can’t code - but who wants to know about those things. I saw Rey as an apprentice, someday. I even joked about it.

But now that I think Rey might be a chick, his thoughts continued, do I still see her as a protege? Do I still want an apprentice? It’s even more appealing that she’s from outside of all this - from New York, from outside the whole West-Coast-California-Tech-Thing - plus, if she actually is a woman, she never really _will_ be inside it, not like I am. Even if she were my right hand at First Order, even if she worked here for twenty years, there are meetings she’d never be invited to. Look at Phasma. If she were a man she’d be running this company. She hasn’t gotten a promotion in six years.

Back on track, Solo, he thought to himself. To me, Rey represents escape, clearly. But is it also the case that I actually might want a girlfriend?

Kylo rubbed his temples. It had been a very long time since he had considered himself someone who wanted female companionship. He’d subsisted on a physical-satisfaction diet of angry, tense celibacy, occasional RedTube benders, embarrassingly expensive six-month camgirl infatuations, and very intense workouts. He really didn’t need much. He didn’t think of himself as someone who wanted to be in a relationship; in good seasons, “married to his work,” in less-good seasons “too much of a mess to date.” But, he forced himself to consider, why then had he gotten so much more interested in Rey once he suspected she was a woman? Was it just the exciting foreignness of a woman who wasn’t paid to be nice being nice anyway? Was it just the novelty of it all? What did any of this mean?

Kylo heaved a deep sigh, no questions answered whatsoever as usual, and started delving into the variety and depth of the New York City public records available online. It was going to be a long night.

\--

When Kylo walked into his office Monday morning, feeling both more and less sure of all the things he thought he knew about his mysterious internet friend, the mood in the office seemed tense. It was a funny thing, how you could tell something was up with coders. It wasn’t like anyone was running around screaming. There was just a little more activity than usual, a little more looking around, a little more physical talking with actual mouths. Just a different vibe.

He knew what was wrong the second he got to his desk. The screen that had been showing rows of green, green validation tests for his models was showing other colors. _Bad_ colors. Yellows, reds, even a black. “What the actual fuck?” Kylo said aloud.

“My feelings exactly,” he heard Snoke say, and jumped as his own personal desk chair whirled slowly to reveal his boss. “What happened to your perfect models yesterday, Ren?”

“I thought you were in China,” Ren choked out.

“I am no longer in China. I’m here and I’m wondering what happened. Were you tinkering with them yesterday? Recall that the models need to be passing for four weeks consistently on fresh silver data for DoD legal to sign off on our ship date. Recall that your esteemed colleague Hux expects his work to be ship ready in,” he looked theatrically at where a watch would be if he wore a watch, “four weeks and two days. Recall that we are months late on this fucking DoD contract, that we have a hard deadline in December, that the contract then goes into breach and we have to renegotiate the entire fucking thing with the fucking federal government, that we get a new fucking administration in January and who knows what the fuck they’ll want - do I need to continue?”

“I wasn’t tinkering with them. I haven’t touched them.”

“Have you changed your data collection? Still using the same sources for your silver validation sets?”

“Yes. We can roll back to some old ones. See if the models have changed.” Kylo’s mind was racing.

“But legal requires new ones. If the models drift from the reality on the ground we can’t launch them. You know this.” 

“I know. I know! Give me a minute. I have to think about this.” 

“You don’t _think_ about this. You _fix_ this. _Today_.”

“Absolutely. Sir. Absolutely.” He had never called his boss “sir” before, never really called anyone “sir,” but in the moment it seemed necessary.

Snoke strode out of Kylo’s office. “Don’t you fucking _dare_ disappoint me, Kylo Ren.” 

\--

It took a week of very little sleep for Kylo Ren to figure out what had happened. He recruited a crack team of security experts from throughout the company over the course of that week in an attempt to figure out how quietly and suddenly their data collection pipeline had been hijacked. 

There was no hack, no breach, just a simple systematic poisoning of the data they had incoming from broad scale crowdsourcing they’d never had any reason to inspect too closely. The thinking around their crowdsourced data was that there was no reason to worry about individual malefactors because the vast majority of people were going to answer the challenges honestly. Clearly, this wasn’t the case, but it took a while before anyone even looked at that pipeline because they were focused on less-broad data sources where disgruntled or malicious individuals could move the needle. It was a huge organizational blind spot, one Kylo whipped up some smoke tests to flag after the fact, but one so catastrophically timed as to be devastating to Starkiller’s prospects. 

And just as they missed their deadline, and therefore missed their launch plan, and therefore ended up in breach of their contracted delivery date, the fucking Resistance sued the federal government over use of the previous iteration of the combat tooling system now known as Starkiller, and the press was brutal. 

Somehow they’d found an enlisted Air Force cadet who’d deserted when he’d been asked to use near-autonomous drones to target individuals, and Kylo’s goddamned harridan do-gooder of a mother had constructed some kind of fucking legal edifice around human rights or something, and this had landed in the DoD’s lap just as they were already reconsidering Starkiller procurement, and fucking everything was awful, and Snoke pretty much just called Kylo into his office every day to yell at him for half an hour while Kylo just had to stand there taking it like a bitch. And of course the shareholders were calling for blood.

And the worst of it was that it was Hux’s fucking fault they’d gotten anywhere _near_ that deadline but Kylo couldn’t even get a word in edgewise to point it out. But of course anything to do with the Resistance meant Kylo was automatically in the soup, and boy, was he in the soup this time. It was very hard to stand in his boss’s office and hear hours of screamed invective about his family, even if nobody hated Kylo fucking Ren's goddamn family more than Kylo fucking Ren, but that was his life now.

He almost wanted to get fired. He totally wanted to quit. The shock of having all this thrown at him at once had made him all too aware of how toxic things were at First Order, and how toxic they’d been for quite some time. He knew he had a lot of skills that a lot of employers would be happy to have under their own roofs. But with an ongoing legal case against his employer, one in which he was almost certain to be deposed and might have to testify, he didn’t want to make any sudden moves that might draw the attention of the court. 

And as it all went down, Rey had disappeared. He wondered if she’d read about him in the paper. There were all kinds of nasty profiles, throwing around descriptors like “evil mastermind” and “architect of carnage” and such. And it wasn’t like he had a common name. He was sure a smart girl like Rey would want to stay well away from being linked to him professionally, let alone personally. 

By some miracle, no journalist had figured out that Kylo Ren was related to Leia Organa. This was the ticking time bomb that really kept Kylo up at night. Snoke knew, and Kylo knew Snoke had mentioned it to a few board members at some point, but the broader public didn’t, and Kylo didn’t want to know how it would go when they found out.


	5. Rey 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey gets a new assignment and embarks on a road trip.

_To: kylomorphism@gmail.com_  
_From: kirarey1992@gmail.com_

_Hi Kylo,_

_Been super busy at work but I wanted to check in. I guess ure the guy whos getting dragged in the paper about all the weapons stuff. U holding up OK?_

_Rey_

 

To say Rey was wracked with guilt about how thoroughly she’d managed to fuck up Kylo Ren’s life was to understate how complex her feelings on the matter were. She knew she didn’t owe him anything. She hadn't used any inside knowledge he'd given her to sabotage his data collection system, it was all her. She knew he was a major-league asshole and the stuff he worked on was scary. To hear Leia or Han or Poe talk about him, he was basically the worst dude on the planet, which was pretty crazy considering she had heard a rumor around headquarters that he was actually Han and Leia’s kid, which over the past few weeks she had grown to believe was true based on nothing but intuition. 

But there was some part of her that still did feel, yeah, pretty guilty. She’d never told anyone at Resistance headquarters that she had any personal connection to him. Probably because it would be obvious to conclude she was sent from First Order to spy. After all, how convenient was it that she’d happened to be a rater when she joined up? No, better not to mention it at all. To either side. 

“What do you think Kylo Ren is going to do after this, Poe?” Rey was working on some deployment configurations at her machine in Resistance headquarters. Poe was sitting with his ass on a desk and his feet on a table, typing on a dented laptop.

“Nothing good. Hope he’s in prison.”

“Do you think there’s - is that likely? Would they put him in prison?”

“Nah. He’s too rich and too white and too male to go to prison.”

“Do you suppose he’ll lose his job?”

“Maybe. Who knows. But it’s the work of a week for a guy like that to find another one, here in this best of all possible worlds.”

\--

_To: kirarey1992@gmail.com_  
_From: kylomorphism@gmail.com_

_Hello Rey,_

_Thanks for your note. Yes, that’s me in the paper. I’m sure you’ve read in the Times that I hunt humans for sport and sleep in a coffin. I’ve had better months, but I’ll survive. I always do._

_How is your job? How is school? Did you finish up your class? Are you going to take another?_

_K_

 

Rey just didn’t feel like this was the email that a truly bad person would send to a near-stranger.

\--

The bot campaign Rey came up with had seemed to do the trick, but once she was through with that and it seemed to have exhausted its usefulness, it wasn’t clear what she was going to do to earn her 22 an hour. There was plenty of code cleanup and documentation to write, and she was keeping herself busy, but especially with the semester coming to a close, she needed a project. 

“Poe, what have you got for me to do? I’m thinking I might not go back to school next semester.”

“Really? Why’s that? They’re offering a couple of classes I think you’ll really enjoy.”

“Yeah, maybe, but I really hate school.”

“Ouch.”

“Nothing to do with your teaching! It just isn’t my thing. I learn on the job.”

“Fair enough. You’re really improving, I see it every time you push new changes.”  

“Thanks. Can you think of any projects worth doing?”

Poe thought for a minute. “Actually, you need to talk to Leia. She brought up something she thinks you’d be good for, something that would scratch an itch for you too, but I think that’s a conversation you two need to have.”

When Leia got back to the office, Poe cornered her and asked her if she could tell Rey more about the project she had in mind. Leia invited Rey into the headquarters’ makeshift office and shut the door, an unusual move.

“Well, there is something we need a person with some technical savvy to do. It’s not really code, though. It’s more like math, I think.”

“That’s...not really my area.” 

“Honestly, none of us are exactly up to this particular challenge. The last time I wrote any nontrivial code I was trying to come up to speed on C++98.” Rey did not know what this meant but it sounded impressively technical. “We need a couple of experts who can look at technical artifacts and code and figure out what they’re doing, so that during discovery we can help build the case that what they’re doing is in violation of current law around autonomous combat units.”

“Okay. I assume Poe is planning to be one of them? This seems like something you could recruit a couple of professors to do, no problem.” Rather than a feckless beginner like me, Rey added silently. 

“Oh, definitely. And we are. It’s just that Ben really learned to write this kind of code from a guy who I doubt will be willing to come testify, and it would be very helpful if someone on our team understood his approach, as I gather it’s rather...idiosyncratic. If you’re up for it, we’d be very very grateful if you could take a little road trip to talk to Luke Skywalker.”

Rey’s mouth dropped open. “He’s alive? Are you sure?”

Leia rolled her eyes. “He’s my brother. Of course I’m sure. Last I heard, he lives in a yurt on an MIT-owned property in New Hampshire someplace.”

It was news to Rey that Leia was related to Luke Skywalker, but that question was crowded out by a much more important concern. 

“What’s a yurt?”

And so it was that Rey was enlisted to find the erstwhile Professor Skywalker’s yurt in rural New Hampshire, and ideally bring him back to Queens, but failing that, at least pick his brain about machine learning.

\--

_To: kylomorphism@gmail.com_  
_From:_ _kirarey1992@gmail.com_

_Hi Kylo,_

_Everyone knows you can’t believe everything you read. A coffin, what rubbish, Im sure u sleep in a race car bed with lightning bolts on the sides like any other grown man. Dont let em get u down homes. Job is good they are sending me on a trip after finals!! Ive never been outside of NY before. Think i might take off a semester i kinda hate school. Do u think thats a bad idea?_

_Rey_

 

_To: kirarey1992@gmail.com_  
_From: kylomorphism@gmail.com_

_Hello Rey,_

_I hate school too. Don’t tell anyone, but I didn’t finish college. So I clearly think you’ll be fine. However, speaking as an older-and-wiser mentor type who wants the best for you, of course you should get an education. Where are you going on your trip?_

_K_

 

Rey didn’t reply right away, because she wasn’t sure if Kylo knew where his uncle lived, and she hoped she could just indefinitely postpone the conversation about whether she had totally ruined his life by joining the Resistance, or only partially ruined his life. It didn’t seem prudent to let on that she was making a highly suspicious trip to meet a professor of some sort in rural New Hampshire. It seemed like the sort of intel that might kickstart all manner of troublesome conversations.

The planning for her trip was more annoying than she’d expected. A lifelong New Yorker, Rey had never even considered learning to drive, and at first there was a lot of chatter about whether she ought to fly or how they should get her over there and finally Chewie, a huge, hairy fellow somehow related to the Skywalker-Organa-Solo clan whose inscrutable accent made his English very hard to understand, agreed to drive her the five hours to New Hampshire in his ancient Subaru Outback and make an extended fishing trip of it someplace nearby while Rey got to know Luke. 

 

_To: kylomorphism@gmail.com_  
_From:_ _kirarey1992@gmail.com_

_Wow, u didnt finish college?? Thats crazy u seem so...ugh I know theres a word for “schooly” but I cant think of it. Thanks for the super parental advice though, yr good at this mentor stuff. Hope stuff has settled down at work. Im pretty nervous abt my trip im gna meet this prof and everyone acts like hes super weird._

_Rey_

 

_To: kirarey1992@gmail.com_  
_From: kylomorphism@gmail.com_

_Hello Rey,_

_I suspect the word you’re thinking of is “academic.” Which I will take as a compliment, though I’m not sure if you meant it that way. They wouldn’t be sending you on this trip if they didn’t think you were going to impress this professor, so try not to worry. Speaking of big trips and intimidating situations, we’re going to start intern hiring after the new year. Let me know if you’d like a free trip to California...to interview, of course._

_K_

\--

Leia insisted that the Resistance buy Rey a smartphone before she went to visit Luke. She’d been limping along with secondhand flip phones as the rest of the world moved into the 21st century because the idea of shelling out for a data plan was abhorrent to her, but Leia was worried that Chewie and Rey would get separated and Rey would end up starving to death in the forest. Rey couldn’t believe all the things phones could do now - suddenly it made sense the way people were always looking at them. 

“Finn, look! I got an app that’s an alarm clock where The Rock says inspiring things to you to wake you up! I can’t believe this is a thing!”

“Gimme that,” Finn replied, taking her phone. “Oh my god, you have like 500 apps. Did you pay for these? Why do you have all these apps?”

“No,” she said, grabbing her phone back. “As if I would pay for an app! But it’s just so interesting all the different things people want their phones to do. Can you imagine being the sort of person who needs a special timer for meditating so it makes a relaxing chime when they can stop?”

“I cannot,” Finn said, grabbing her phone again, “and yet I see that you have four meditation timing apps. Which one is best, you weird connoisseur?”

“I don’t know! And I love it!”

He shook his head and handed the phone back. “Have you come up with a plan for Luke Skywalker? I hear he’s strange.”

“I don’t think you can plan around strange. But it’s been good practice spending so much time here,” Rey laughed. “Lots of weirdos.”

“You can say that again,” Han interjected as he sloped through the room, picking up a donut as he went and taking a bite. “Whose donuts are these?”

“I think Amilyn brought - ”

“Augh, they’re gluten-free,” Han moaned, spitting out the bite in his mouth. “Why Leia keeps Amilyn around I will never know. Ugh, it’s like sawdust.” Han poured himself a cup of very strong, not very warm coffee and took a huge swig, swishing it around his mouth like mouthwash. “Are you worrying about Luke? Is that what I overheard?”

“Yeah, a bit. The rumors are...strange.”

“Luke is - don’t worry about Luke. He’ll like you. He’s an earnest, thoughtful saint of a man, and he won’t find anything objectionable about you. He won’t want to talk, but if you’re persistent he will. Give him a few days and he’ll be okay.”

“A few days?”

“You’re bringing a tent, right? You should be bringing a tent.”

“I wasn’t planning to bring a tent.”

“You don’t want to share a yurt of unknown size with Luke when he isn’t talking to you yet. Bring a tent, I’m sure Leia’s got one stashed someplace in this heap. Make sure you’ve got a sleeping bag that’s rated below freezing too. And a good jacket. And a solar charger for that phone.” Han stumped off downstairs. “Just don’t get him started about the Great Pumpkin.”

Rey and Finn looked at each other. “The what now?” asked Rey.

Finn laughed. “Who knows? Good luck!”

\--

As Rey packed her things, she realized she actually had so few things and they were of so little value that she could probably stash them in a corner at Resistance headquarters and sleep on one of the many comfortable couches there instead of paying rent. In a snap, Rey made the most impulsive decision she’d ever made in her life. She had a few trinkets from her childhood, a week or so of clothes, her dear old laptop, a pan, a fork, a spoon, a knife, five or six books. It was such a small life she led, Rey thought, to be swept up in such historic currents. She didn’t understand how she’d wound up where she was, in a position to influence how wars were waged. She felt deeply underqualified for the role. She tapped out a brief message on her laptop as she finished organizing all her worldly effects into a big duffel bag she’d borrowed from Finn.

_To: kylomorphism@gmail.com_  
_From: kirarey1992@gmail.com_

_Do u ever wonder what’s yr place in all this? Isnt it crazy being so involved in history? Doesnt it freak u out? Do u ever feel like yr not really qualified to be making the decisions u make??_

_Rey_

 

And then she was off. She left a note and a last-month’s rent in a neat stack of cash for her landlord, who didn’t deserve the consideration, and opted to pay for a cab so she wouldn’t have to hoof it with her heavy bag back to where the Resistance lived. Rey knew this should have scared her. It wasn’t like her not to maintain an independent residence, and she felt a bone-deep pang of knowledge that if her parents came back, they wouldn’t be able to find her. But as she watched her old street in Corona disappear behind her, she felt nothing but free. 

As she and Chewie packed the car, Rey felt as though she was in a dream. What would New Hampshire be like? What would it be like to be anywhere that wasn’t New York City?

They loaded camp food and cooking gear, tons of cold weather equipment, fishing things for Chewie, map books, lots of pens and paper so Rey could take notes, solar chargers, and all manner of portable networking things so that Chewie could stay in touch with headquarters while Rey was in the woods. Leia pondered sending Rey with Luke’s old PowerBook but decided that was a bit too much heavy-handed symbolism even for the Resistance. And then Chewie started the Outback, popped Workingman’s Dead into the tape deck, and they were off. 

Rey watched the windows, rapt as the city fell away and rural pine woods dusted with snow spread out before her. “I didn’t know there was so much green in the whole world,” she whispered reverently to herself, and Chewie heard her and grunted agreement. Rey looked down at her phone and saw she’d just received an email. It took her a moment to remember the context of the conversation, so taken was she with the scenery, but as she paged the thread into her working memory her heart broke a little for the man who’d written the email.

 

_To: kirarey1992@gmail.com_  
_From: kylomorphism@gmail.com_

_Hello Rey,_

_On the one hand, of course. On the other hand, I’m acutely aware that I’m just as qualified as anyone else. If that doesn’t terrify you, it should._

_K_

 

She couldn’t stop herself from sending him just a quick note back.

 

_To: kylomorphism@gmail.com_  
_From: kirarey1992@gmail.com_

_Wanna know something weird though? It actually doesn’t. I couldn’t tell you why, but it doesn’t._

_Rey_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's really an app. It's called The Rock Clock.


	6. Kylo 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The truth comes out.

Kylo Ren suppressed a half-sob as he read Rey’s email over to himself at his desk, at home alone in his too-empty apartment. If he’d thought the work culture at First Order had been toxic before the Starkiller contract fell through and the lawsuit arrived at their door, it was a fucking Waldorf school in a rich suburb of Minneapolis compared to the work culture now. Even the administrative assistants had stopped being polite. He’d caught Phasma - _Phasma!_ \- crying at her desk last week. 

Snoke was quite certain that the suit was without merit and would be thrown out of court, and snarled that certainty at anyone within earshot multiple times in any given hour. But in the meantime, the legal department had instituted blanket document retention for everyone working on Starkiller in any capacity, and suddenly everyone was wondering what they’d written to one another in private about corners they’d cut or numbers they’d fudged that could end up as evidence in a supremely embarrassing, supremely expensive lawsuit. It was widely believed that even if the lawsuit didn’t succeed, the board was nearly guaranteed to remove a couple of high-level executives to send shareholders a message about cleaning house and turning over a new leaf. 

Kylo had heard that a number of the VPs had a pool going about who was most likely to take the fall for the suit. It seemed that the frontrunners were him, Snoke, and Hux, with their lead counsel Moden Canady in a distant fourth place, all of which made sense. He reasoned through each of the options in his head:

**Snoke:** obviously the power center of the company as CEO, so the buck stopped with him on bad decisions. Widely hated inside and outside the company. Once caricatured as a literal ghoul on the cover of _Newsweek_. Very unpleasant to be around. On the other hand, very well connected in military-industrial complex and knew where a lot of bodies were buried. Unless some really weird or super illegal stuff came up in discovery or court, Kylo reckoned he was probably safe.

**Hux:** eminently punchable face and personality to match. Had already been in hot water with the board for missed deadlines. On the other hand, impeccable Cambridge-LSE-HBS-McKinsey pedigree, arguably way more traditionally “corporate” than other possible candidates in personality and style. If not out on his ass, possibly a very safe CEO candidate. Toss-up.

**Canady:** if First Order got really taken to the cleaners in court, Canady would obviously be partly to blame. Plus, his department had negotiated the legal requirements to launch, which in retrospect had been a bit of a clusterfuck. On the other hand, Canady was way less famous so probably not sufficient to satisfy the board on his own. Toss-up.

**Ren:** known for erratic temper and difficult personality. Issues with his models had directly caused the late certification of legal launch readiness and subsequent failure to deliver of Starkiller. Some board members aware of his familial connections to Resistance leadership, which might or might not be a strike against him (could potentially represent really major “turning over new leaf” commitment if spun correctly?). On the other hand, due to technical skills, hard to replace compared to other two. But not that hard especially given skills all acquired via experience rather than in more conventional educational format; probably the obvious candidate to eliminate. If this had not been Kylo's own personal self he'd be trying to figure out whom to contact to place a bet on his termination.

Kylo knew he should be making contingency plans. He knew it. But instead he was composing long emails to Rey on his personal phone and not sending them, and spending hours wordsmithing the terse ones he did send, and trying to figure out if he could get any more information about her than he already had. He was taking vacation days to stay home in bed, and showing up at work but spending most day in the gym or in the cafe or on the toilet starting fights on politics subreddits in the privacy of a bathroom stall in a building far from his desk. He hadn’t seen any of his actual work colleagues in days, except for occasionally showing up to meetings with Snoke and agreeing with the abuse heaped on him. He wasn’t answering his email. 

He scheduled an interview with a competitor, rescheduled it, canceled it. Part of him was worried that if he left First Order the suit would be pinned on him and he’d somehow be personally liable. 

He scheduled a consultation with a personal attorney to find out. Rescheduled it. Canceled it. Looked up reviews of local therapists who took his insurance. Closed the tab. 

 

_To: kirarey1992@gmail.com_  
_From: kylomorphism@gmail.com_

_Hello Rey,_

_Thanks for the vote of confidence. I think you might be the only person on the planet who feels that way about me right now._

_K_

 

Kylo actually found himself booking a ticket to New York when it occurred to him that Rey was probably on her trip already and he didn’t know when she’d be back. 

 

_To: kirarey1992@gmail.com_  
_From: kylomorphism@gmail.com_

_Hello Rey,_

_Did you ever tell me where you were going on your trip?_

_K_

 

He didn’t hear back from her for a few days. The rational part of him knew it was probably because she was busy doing whatever on earth she was supposed to be doing with this weird professor. But the irrational part of him began to have vague, confused suspicions about Rey.

Then, out of the blue, he got a chat on his phone while he was at the office hiding in an empty conference room on a sales floor, from her personal account to his.

“hay sup,” it said. He felt his face blush when he saw it.

“Not much,” he lied. “Are you on your trip now? How’s it going?”

“ya i am,” she said. “its going ok. i mean tbh it could be going better. hes really like even way weirder than i expected?”

“Who is he? Maybe I’ve heard of him.”

There was a very long pause. An unnervingly long pause. 

“im really scared to tell u cause its gonna be a real real awk convo and i think ure gona hate me after.”

Kylo had no idea how to respond to that. 

“and idk im not sure why but i really dont want u to hate me? like i know yr a stranger and all practically. but i feel like i know u. and i dont know that many people, and uve been super nice mostly, and i know ure going through some shit n i dont want to make yr life even worse, sorry i ramble a bit when im nervous.”

Kylo breathed out a laugh in a huff of breath he didn’t know he was holding. “You do, yes.” His mind raced. What on earth could Rey be trying to tell him? Did he want to know? 

“Look, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. If this is none of my business you can always say so.”

“Oh im pretty sure its 1000% your business, thats the issue.” 

Suddenly, in a flash, Kylo Ren put a number of pieces together, because he suddenly remembered that Queensborough City College was where that cunt of a childhood friend and current Resistance leader Poe Dameron taught. For all he knew his parents still had a house in Queens. What else could be “1000% his business”? What else could this random student be involved in that would concern him at all? 

What an idiot he’d been. The obvious answer had been staring him in the face for weeks. He jumped to a whole bunch of conclusions all at once.

Rey was typing but he didn’t let her finish. He sent a rapid-fire series of chats all in a row.

“Are trying to draw Luke motherfucking Skywalker out of his shell?” 

“Is that your goddamned eccentric professor, Rey?” 

“Have you been working with my parents to try to take me down?” 

“Was your awesome new coding job writing a goddamn botnet for the goddamn Resistance?”

There was a long pause on her end before “oh god sorry dont hate me” came through. 

Kylo threw his phone at the floor of the conference room and smashed it with the heel of his shoe. He stomped the fucking phone to dust. And then he burst out of the room into the hall, phone fragments in hand, ran to the breakroom at the end of the hall which had a lovely tenth-floor balcony, and dropkicked what was left of it into traffic. 

“Fuck!” he screamed over the sound of honking and swerving that his falling electronics had elicited. “Fuuuck!”

And then Kylo ran down ten flights of stairs, and ran fourteen city blocks in thick fog, and only realized a few steps from his door that he’d left his car at work. He shrugged and took the elevator up.

\--

The walk had given him time to think. 

Oh, assuming he was correct and the bot attack had been mostly or entirely her doing, Rey had really fucked up his life. She absolutely had. She had set his career back, potentially dramatically, potentially in a way that could be very expensive. Hell, potentially in some universe in a way that meant jail time or some huge fine he would have to personally pay, who knew. She had made his work life hellish in the short term. On a personal level, she had made a lot of trouble for him. On a personal level, he was very, very angry.

On a professional level, things were mixed. Anyone working in his field could make a good argument for why they personally were working on autonomous weapons. But almost nobody’s argument was “because I think they’re a great idea and will definitely improve the world.” All the justifications he’d ever heard for participating in AI weapons development sprung from nationalism (“oh, because you want _China_ to get smart drones before _we_ do, is that it?”) or inevitability (“it’s on the way no matter what I think about it and I may as well work on it to try to make it draw smart conclusions i.e. not shoot incorrect targets”), not from any kind of deep optimism about the tech itself. 

Anyone with a brain knew AI wasn’t perfect, that mistakes would be made, that it was easier to tolerate a mistake made by a human because the human could be punished in a way that the victims and their families might think was meaningful or fair. Anyone could follow autonomous weapons to possibly dystopian conclusions. Sure, utopian conclusions were possible too, but didn’t seem nearly as likely. Kylo wasn’t blind. He knew the critiques of his work. He didn’t skip into the office every day handing out lollipops. It wasn’t work he loved to do, and part of him might have been quietly relieved to have an excuse to leave it behind.

He’d joined First Order as a young man because he didn’t have a degree and didn’t see a route to finish the one he’d started. When Uncle Luke’s fledgling university had fallen apart after just six years, and taken Kylo’s interdisciplinary computer science degree down with it in spectacular fashion, it had just seemed too hard to try to start over at a school that would certainly be more regimented, more strict, less tolerant of Kylo and his eccentricities and spotty, piecemeal education to date. But Snoke had recruited him for a junior engineering position straight out of a failed academic institution run by his family member, and Kylo had never forgotten it. 

Where trusting in Uncle Luke had fucked him over, trusting in Snoke had paid dividends. Snoke had seen something in his work that nobody else had ever celebrated, had encouraged Kylo to double down on his strengths and nurture his weaknesses into a reputation of misunderstood genius. And Kylo had repaid the nasty, small, cruel old man with loyalty and hard work, changing his name to distance himself from his activist family, resolving to be the cruelest lieutenant in a cruel bunch to build the kind of cutthroat corporate culture Snoke clearly relished and delighted in, staying on at First Order for years after he’d gotten enough industry time and enough high-profile launches under his belt that he no longer worried about his lack of formal academic credentials. Plenty of famous hackers hadn’t finished school, everyone knew that. 

But when was such a debt paid? How long did Kylo Ren owe Snoke? Was it a life sentence, taking generosity from a man with so much to give?

But of course, things had changed. Now there was the lawsuit to consider. Things were so much more complicated than they’d been a few weeks ago. As Kylo unlocked his apartment door, pulling off his sweaty t-shirt as he did so, he heard his desktop computer trying to initiate a video call. He ran over to the monitor and unlocked it. The call was Rey.

Kylo ran a hand through his damp hair and answered it before he could reconsider.

“Hi,” he said. Her video feed hadn’t appeared yet. 

“Omigod,” she whispered. “Kylo, I am so sorry. I am _so_ sorry.”

And then her face appeared on his screen, pixelated and laggy but there, and he could not believe his eyes. 

“You know what? Don’t be.” 

How could he stay angry at a face like this one?

“No, I - oh, there you are. You look different than you do in the press.” There was a pause just long enough to be awkward. “I mean, not even including that you aren’t wearing a shirt. Do you have a - I don’t know, a hoodie you could put on or something?”

Kylo ignored her. “You - where are you? Why are you whispering?”

“I’m in a tent. Luke Skywalker still won’t talk to me and I’m camping outside his yurt.”

“In New Hampshire? In winter?”

“I have all this snow camping gear.” She moved the camera around briefly so he could see a blurry image of what appeared to be some of _his_ old camping equipment, prominently labeled with his name, from an ill-fated early-teens stint in a very hardcore Boy Scout troop he and Han had signed up for in an abortive attempt to spend more time together doing manly activities. “Kylo, my life has seriously gotten so weird.” 

Weeks of tension escaped Kylo Ren in a single, barked laugh. “God, mine too.” She was so beautiful, so much more beautiful than it had ever even occurred to him to hope. She looked like a movie star on the slow mobile data connection. Her voice was like a little bell, a singing bird, absolution.

He knew he was probably letting his heart drive, or possibly just his dick, but part of him had already forgiven her everything she’d ever done to hurt him. Which was confusing because so much of him still hated and feared her.

They were both silent for a minute. “What happened? I sent you like 1000 chats but you stopped replying.”

“Oh, I, well. I may have stomped my phone into bits and thrown the remains ten floors down into traffic. Perhaps.”

“God, I’m _so_ sorry. I felt worse and worse keeping this from you. You’ve never been anything but decent to me. It was just a job, you know? And just so many crazy coincidences in such a short span of time. I just got swept up in feeling useful for a change.”

“I know. It was just a job. I understand completely.” He understood _completely_.

“Do you really? I’ve heard a lot about your temper. You literally kicked a dog at work once.” 

“That is _hogwash_.”

“I read it in _Business Insider_. I’ve read a lot of articles about you. Think I know you pret-ty well.” She winked. Was she _flirting_?

“I would swear in court that I’ve never kicked a dog. Now, have I sarcastically made a foot motion indicating I was _thinking_ about kicking a dog? Who hasn’t. But did I actually _kick_ the dog? I did not.” Well, _he_ was flirting. At least he thought this was what flirting looked like. To say he was out of practice was grave, grave understatement.

Rey snorted. “And that’s what counts.” 

“It is!”

“What are you going to do about your phone, though? Do you need it for work?”

“Oh, no, it was my personal phone. Totally separate. I’m not even allowed to have the personal phone on the work network. And don’t worry, I have a ton of old phones sitting around I can fall back to, it’s seriously no big deal.” 

“I can’t believe you threw it into traffic.”

“But you believed I kicked a dog?”

“I read it on the internet!”

“My point exactly!”

They grinned at each other like idiots. 

“Oh, shit,” whispered Rey. “I think I hear Luke Skywalker moving around. I’d better go.”

“Give him a peanut butter and bacon sandwich, it’s his weakness.”

“Really?”

“No. He’s vegetarian.”

“God _damn_ it,” she said, and hung up.

Kylo breathed out a long, shaky breath. Then breathed in a long, shaky breath, then kept doing that for a few minutes. And then he lowered his head to the desk and hit it one, two, three, four times, and left it down. And then he said a low, prayerful “Fuuuuuck,” and got up and washed his hands and splashed water on his face. 

And then, for the first time since he’d joined First Order as a scared twenty-year-old with no degree and no confidence, he let himself cry, really cry, cry so hard that at the end he felt wrung out and exhausted and, somehow, better.

 

_To: kirarey1992@gmail.com_  
_From: kylomorphism@gmail.com_

_Hello Rey,_

_What did you mean by “so many crazy coincidences”? Can we start from the beginning? How did we end up where we are?_

_K_


	7. Rey 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luke says his piece.

_To: kylomorphism@gmail.com  
From: kirarey1992@gmail.com_

_Hi Kylo,_

_I really did just start programming a couple months ago in an intro class at community college. My lab partner was working on a different thing with the resistance and lured me there with promises of 22 bucks an hour. Srsly had no political anything just wanted a paycheck._

_Rey_

 

_To: kirarey1992@gmail.com  
From: kylomorphism@gmail.com_

_Hello Rey,_

_That’s how they get you. You don’t have anywhere to go, or you’re young and don’t know anyone, or you’re scared, and they tell you you’ll be richer or more powerful or more_ indispensable _than you ever dreamed. And it’s not a lie, but it’s easy to go on without thinking too hard about what you’re doing - and then to keep doing things you’re less and less sure about, because you’ve already done them once._

_K_

 

_To: kylomorphism@gmail.com  
From: _ _kirarey1992@gmail.com_

_God, EXACTLY!!!!! Once I got the 1st bot working everyone was so pumped and impressed and it was like I mean I could probs spoof these origins and do 1000x the damage and they were like U CAAAN???? and it was like ummm I guess sure and then I did it and the whole time I was like man but thats my boy kylo on the other end but I mean u probs know how they all feel about u if I told them I knew u itd be like “pistols at dawn” up in this 4 rls._

_Rey_

 

_To: kirarey1992@gmail.com  
From: kylomorphism@gmail.com_

_I know. I’m not going to tell you I don’t deserve some of their ire. The morality of the work I do isn’t crystal clear, even to me, but I go in and do it every day, and I do it well._

_K_

 

_To: kylomorphism@gmail.com  
From: _ _kirarey1992@gmail.com_

_But then why do u keep it up?? I bet u could go work at like apple or something and just make shiny tablet crap for the rest of yr life_

_Rey_

 

_To: kirarey1992@gmail.com  
From: kylomorphism@gmail.com_

_First Order was there for me when nobody else was. I pay my debts. And at this point, this is what I know how to do. They’d do it with or without me, and if I work on it I’m more confident that we ship a quality product that makes fewer lethal mistakes. Perhaps this is self-delusion or rationalization. But it’s what keeps me coming to work in the morning, either way._

_K_

 

Rey hadn’t realized how much it had bothered her not to be open with him about how their lives had intersected. She wasn’t sure if he believed her or not, but it felt good to tell him the truth - to know it was the truth, to lay it all out for him and let _him_ decide if he wanted to continue communicating with her. She realized that so much of her guilt had not been about what she’d actually done, but more about not giving him all the information he needed to make a decision.

 

_To: kylomorphism@gmail.com  
From: _ _kirarey1992@gmail.com_

_Not sure i agree w yr conclusion but I see where ur coming from. god its so complicated knowing how to write software homes_

_Rey_

 

It was nice that something was going right, because this had otherwise been a very trying few days.

—

The first contact between Rey and Luke Skywalker had been like something out of a strange dream. The yurt was a weird little dome nestled in a glen out of a fairy tale. It had a solid wooden door with a circular window on each side, and smoke belching cosily from a chimney located at the center. It was jauntily festooned with colored flags and “Property of MIT Recreation” was painted on the side in fading red letters. Rey trudged up the steps and knocked. 

“Who is it?” shouted a voice.

Rey had not prepared for this. “Hello, I’m Rey,” she said stupidly. 

“Are you from Comcast?”

“No.”

“Are you from Verizon?”

“No. Do cable and internet companies really hike out to the woods to bother you?”

“Nobody else does. Are you from MIT? You can reserve a yurt like this at recreation.mit.edu. Not this exact yurt, though. This one is mine. I live in it.”

“I’m not, no.”

“Where are you from, then?”

“I’m from the Resistance.”

Rey heard the sound of a deadbolt sliding into place. “Shit,” she whispered to herself. “I’m not going away,” she said loudly enough for him to hear her.

“Gonna get pretty cold tonight, revolutionary.”

“I’ve got gear.”

“Whatever floats your boat.”

Rey could detect the warm, green smell of marijuana smoke inside, could feel the heat escaping through the fabric walls of the yurt. Setting up her tent, something she’d never tried before, did not seem like much fun. She tried to put a positive face on it; at least it wasn’t raining or snowing, at least she still had light. At least she was out in the woods, seeing nature for the first time. At least if shit really got bad she knew where Chewie had parked, and it wasn’t far. 

With less trouble than she’d expected, Rey got her campsite set up and set to cooking herself some beans and rice. O luxury, she’d even brought a couple of eggs to crack into it on the first night camping, and a chocolate bar for dessert to add more fat and sugar to keep her warm all night. Rey had slept on the street more times than she cared to recount, a few times in below-freezing temperatures, but it had been a while; still, survival skills for such situations were things one didn’t forget. 

She just hoped Luke Skywalker would open the door tomorrow.

— 

Knock, knock.

“Comcast?” rang Luke’s voice. 

“Guess again,” Rey replied.

“I’m not interested in talking to you.”

“Look, I’m not trying to get you to go back. I know you won’t. I just want to learn.”

“You want to learn what I know, and take it back to the Resistance and use it. No thank you. I don’t take sides in this particular war anymore.”

“I’m on my own side, really. I don’t know what I want to do with the stuff you know. I just know I want to know it.”

“Then why did you say you were from the Resistance?”

“They sent me. But I’m here on my own.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“I want to help them. They’ve been kind to me, helped me out when I needed it. And I don’t think they’re wrong, necessarily. But I wouldn’t mind being corrected on that last point. I just want to - I’ve never followed politics, and suddenly my stance on fundamental issues of my time really matters to me, and I feel I - I lack the background.”

The plastic window to the right of the door slid open with a rattle, and a hand reached out, holding a book. 

“Um, thanks?” Rey said, taking the book. It was _A People’s History of the United States_.

“You’re welcome. Here’s another one.” The hand reached out again, with _Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_. “Read those and come back if you have any questions.”

“This is at least a month’s worth of reading.”

“Hope you’ve got a lot of snacks in that tent.”

Rey was momentarily at a loss for what to say. As she struggled for a comeback, Luke Skywalker cranked the volume on his stereo and was now listening to Pet Sounds at what had to be a truly deafening volume inside.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Rey said. 

She tried to read _Gödel, Escher, Bach_ , she honestly did, but it seemed a bit of a reach to try to claim its whimsical treatment of fundamental theorems of number theory had any immediate bearing on her current situation. And so, frustrated by her total lack of progress in one area of her life, she’d sent a chat to Kylo Ren, and somehow the whole truth had come out. They were up emailing and chatting back and forth for half the night. Rey thanked her stars that the weather had been clear. 

\--

Rey knocked again.

“Did you read the books?”

“Yes.”

“ _Really_.”

“No.”

“Why are you here?”

“I want to know about machine learning. About artificial intelligence. How does it work?”

“You could learn that in dozens of computer science programs. Why are you _here_?”

“The Resistance sent me.” 

“You’re going in circles.” 

“I don’t know, okay? I don’t know. I got into this whole situation because I was curious about machine learning. I asked about it in class, got my professor’s attention, one thing leads to another and I end up with this weird job offer. Suddenly I’m singlehandedly destroying this huge government project, and I’m involved in this insane lawsuit, and I still don’t even know how any of this works! Don’t you dare send me a link to some fucking Andrew Ng Coursera class. I want to know, from you, what this is all about. Why did you study it? Why did you quit? Why do you live in a yurt in the woods, and why does MIT let you?”

There was silence on the other side of the door, such a long silence that Rey heaved a great sigh and made to turn around and return to her tent. And then, all of a sudden, Luke Skywalker unlocked the door and turned the knob. “Follow me,” he said. And Rey did. 

He didn’t talk to her. She just followed him as he did some sort of foraging expedition. He picked some mushrooms. He milked a goat that was tied up near the yurt and took a huge pull of the fresh milk, not offering her any. He checked various rain and snow gauges, sniffed random animal poops he found on the ground, and made some big stupid show of ignoring her as he went around doing his quotidian hermit tasks. When they got back to the yurt, Rey asked, “Can I come in?”

Luke Skywalker thought for a minute, then said, “No,” and shut the door behind him.

Rey pressed her lips into a hard thin line, clenched her fists, closed her eyes and kicked a good cup and a half of mud at his door, then stomped off to her tent. 

“what is _wrong_ with luke skywalker srsly,” she typed to Kylo on her phone once inside.

“If only we knew maybe we could cure it,” he replied immediately, and she laughed out loud. 

Just then she heard footsteps outside and a sort of brushing approximation of a knock on her tent. “Who is it?”

“Comcast,” Luke Skywalker said. 

“Cute,” she replied. 

“Three days. Three day crash course. Then you go away and tell everyone I’m dead.” 

“You want me to tell your twin sister you’re dead?”

“Yes.”

Rey thought for a second. “Deal.” She unzipped her tent and followed Luke Skywalker into his yurt, trying very hard not to think about how strange her life had become since she’d started night school, trying even harder not to wonder if she could tell visually whether this was a “weirdo yurt” or a “murder yurt.”

The yurt was spartan but strangely cosy inside, the comforting herbal whiff of weed smoke pervading the warm space. There wasn’t much furniture. A wood-burning stove provided heat and much of the light. Improbably, though, there was a whiteboard, and it was to the whiteboard that Luke Skywalker strode. “Sit down,” he said. “What do you know about deep learning?”

“Literally nothing,” Rey said truthfully.

“Great,” replied Luke, stretching his arms before him and then picking up a whiteboard marker, tossing it in the air, and catching it with a casual flourish. “Less to unlearn.” He began to write. He drew an x and y axis, then stopped.

“So, traditional machine learning - what do you know about traditional machine learning?”

“Also nothing.”

“Where did they find you, anyway? Are you a graduate student?”

“I recently got an A+ in Intro to Computer Science and Programming in Python at Queensborough Community College.”

“Congratulations,” Luke said sardonically. “I can see why, given those impeccable credentials, you were sent to learn from me.”

“Yes, I’ve heard it’s very exclusive to take a private tutorial from a squatter in the woods.” 

“Touché,” he replied. And then he collected himself, in the manner of a former professor who hasn’t lectured in a while but finds it’s rather like riding a bicycle.

“Let me back up. AI has a long, weird history. _Gödel, Escher, Bach_ will give you some of the flavor; I didn’t give it to you just to be a dick. The pertinent knowledge you need to have for this discussion and to understand the broader historical moment is that a technology called neural networks was widely touted in the 80s as being the key to a problem computer scientists have wanted to solve ever since computers were invented: how to create an artificial general intelligence - which I’ll call AGI for short from now on since that’s a mouthful - that is, a human-style flexible, learning brain on a silicon substrate. Neural nets were hot for a time because the way they operate was designed to mimic a real, neuron-based brain. Idea being, that if you built a big enough neural net, maybe you’d end up with an AGI as an emergent property of the system’s complexity. But in the late 80s and early 90s, they fell out of fashion, because they couldn’t live up to their promise. 

“Computer science moved on and we entered what’s known in the field as an AI winter, i.e. a time period where nobody cool works on AI, or if they do they try to call it something else, like machine learning or statistical learning or cognitive computing or whatever. 

“When I was founding my university, in the 1990s, nobody was interested in neural nets. There just wasn’t enough computing power on the planet to make them do anything exciting. People were making boatloads of money learning separating hyperplanes with support vector machines as if that was some kind of revolution. But I kept plugging away at neural nets, trying to make them cheaper and faster, trying to optimize them so that when the compute resources came along, I would be ready. 

“I recruited a few students of like mind to come join me at the University of the Future, among them the defense technologist now known as Kylo Ren, then known as Ben Solo if you ever want to look up any of his publications. He was brilliant, I couldn’t possibly deny that, but his focus was on quick wins and applications, whereas I saw all the work we were doing as a means to an end to create an AGI. We had a falling out as my funding collapsed, and he took what he knew, what I’d taught him, and used it. Sometime in the last decade, it suddenly became not just feasible but cheap to throw my decades of research at any hard problem you could think of. And Ben knew my research better than anyone.

“I can tell you how to build a neural net to do anything you can think of. But hundreds, thousands of people in the world could tell you how to do that. A bright undergrad can build a neural net to solve a complex problem in a weekend; a dedicated practitioner can upend an industry in six months. I’ll own that I can probably build you one that’s cheaper in terms of compute power, but nobody even cares about that anymore; if people would knock off using half the world’s cycles to mine bitcoin we’d have enough computational power as a civilization to do anything we could dream up. What I alone can tell you is why you shouldn’t.”

Rey’s attention was rapt. “And? Why shouldn’t I?”

Luke seemed to shrink physically. “I’m done for the day. Here, here’s a laptop. I want you to work your way through a tutorial so you’ll actually have some small fraction of the technical background to understand my objections. What languages do you write?”

“Python.” 

“Great, nice. Terse Tensorflow API. You’ll be detecting cat videos in half an hour.”

It took Rey longer than half an hour to detect cat videos, but detect them she did, and it happened before the early winter sundown. “Well, that was easier than I expected!” she said with a grin when her cat detection accuracy was satisfactory to her.

“Makes you feel pretty good, huh?”

“Yeah! Very fun!”

“That dopamine hit is really something! Like when your unit tests pass, but more so, right?” His tone made Rey feel as though agreeing with the assertion was a bad idea.

“It…sure is…?”

“Does that bother you at all?”

“I expect you’re about to tell me it should.”

“Right in one,” Luke said, tapping his nose. “We’ll talk more tomorrow. Do you want to sleep in here?” 

Rey looked around, taking in the distinct lack of privacy. “No, thanks. My tent is fine. But I wouldn’t mind a meal cooked indoors, if you’ve got anything to spare. I’d be happy to contribute ingredients in exchange for the use of your kitchen.”

“Sure, sounds good, as long as you can use those mushrooms I foraged this morning. They won’t keep.” 

They enjoyed a quiet but companionable meal of soup Rey whipped up, Luke asking her about herself and getting updates on their various acquaintances in common. Rey was embarrassed not to have paid much attention to most of the other Resistance members except inasmuch as they could help her write the code she was trying to write; she didn’t really have any idea how Han or Leia were doing other than, “Well, I can tell you neither of them have learned to write Python in the years since you’ve seen them last.” 

Then the conversation stumbled onto the bot attack on First Order and the lawsuit, and suddenly Rey had a lot to say. She filled him in on what was going on, careful not to add any insider knowledge of Kylo Ren or his activities, extra careful not to be at all sympathetic to his situation. Luke seemed to get more and more tired and depressed as she related the blow-by-blow, and by the end of the story all the fight seemed to have gone out of him.

“Same old battles, over and over,” he sighed. “But each time the tech gets better and the world gets scarier.”

“I should probably hit the hay. Big training day tomorrow, right? Are we going to go out and forage and such first, or just get straight into technical stuff?”

“Are you implying that foraging isn’t technical?”

She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. Computational stuff.”

“I do that every day the weather permits it. You are welcome but not required to join me.”

“Okay. I’ll see what time I wake up. Thanks, Dr. Skywalker.”

“Oh my god, please never call me that again. Luke. I’m Luke.”

“Good night, Luke,” she said, crossing the few feet of mud to her tent.

Chats from Kylo Ren were waiting for her on her phone once she took off her boots and went inside. 

“How’s it going? I hope your silence indicates that Uncle Luke is enlightening you about life, the universe, and everything.”

“ya i finally got him to talk n now he wont stop its magnificent. ‘uncle luke’??? god I know on a rational level that hes yr uncle but its soooo weird to think ur related to this crazy forest hobo.”

“I agree. It’s weird to me too. And yet, family is what it is.”

“i wouldnt know.” 

“What, you don’t have a family?”

“nope.”

“Sure you do.”

“nope.”

“You don’t know who your parents are?”

“nope.”

“Interesting.” Then there was a long pause and a bunch of ellipses stopping and starting. “Shit, I’ve got to go. I’ll talk to you about it some other time.” He signed off.

“What the _actual fuck_ is wrong with every last person in this family,” Rey said to herself.

\--

The next day dawned late, and Rey decided she should probably go foraging with Luke to stay on his good side. It was just as weird the second time around. He offered her the goat milk, which she opted to decline. “Your loss,” he said. 

When they began the second day of her tutorial, Luke first took a look at her code from the previous day, critiquing how she’d structured it, how she’d named things, how she’d used her input data, how she’d tested it. It was the most thorough code review she’d ever had, given without judgment, and she tried to accept it with gratitude in the spirit in which it was offered, though she was embarrassed at how many things he found to criticize. 

“I wish you could just teach me to program. I bet your code is gorgeous.”

“I don’t write code much anymore. Better, more productive things to do.”

“Like what?”

“Literally anything,” Luke replied, and without further ado, day two began. 

“Remember what I said about dopamine last night?” 

Sensing that the question wasn’t entirely rhetorical, Rey nodded. 

“I posit that some staggering percentage of machine learning and AI practitioners working today got into it in the first place because they loved tuning their models, trying to squeeze every ounce of precision and recall out of their data and model architecture. It’s absolutely addictive. It’s like being a teacher, but without the snot-nosed asshole students. Like being a boss, but you don’t have to pay the algorithm for its time. Like being a parent, but you never have to wake up in the middle of the night, and you can do it even if you’re a man who would be happy never to speak to a woman. Like being a god, but you can do it even if you’re mortal. You feel it, right? You just taught a machine something, arguably something useful and not that easy, and you barely did any work. You defined a statistical relationship and let it go to town. Compare it to the kind of programming you learned in class. Imagine trying to recognize cat videos without machine learning.”

“I absolutely see what you’re saying. You get so much functionality, for so little code. It feels like magic.”

“A healthier society would teach us to question that feeling of power, that magic box that spits out a yes or a no or a score or a ranking, to interrogate it and understand that a thing we do that feels that good and that easy, that gives us quick, simple answers to hard, complicated questions, is inherently dangerous. But right now, in tech, we lean into it, to our peril. It’s my belief that the field of AI attracts the people who should be trusted least with its power.

“After decades of work, I left it all behind. And I’m sure the state of the art has leapfrogged since.” Luke stopped, a pensive look on his face.

“Definitely. In the past decade it feels like machine learning has taken over the world. I don’t think most people even know what it means, but definitely everyone has heard of it.”

“And do they trust it?”

“Implicitly. With everything. Look, do you want to see my phone? It has an onboard AI chip and it does some seriously crazy shit.”

Rey was glad she had so many apps. She showed him the translation tool, the real-time voice transcription, the various novelty photo editing apps she’d downloaded. Luke took it all in with an air of sad resignation, his face growing graver and graver as she demonstrated all the weird stuff her phone knew how to do.

“It’s even worse than I imagined. I’m not sure where this species goes from here. I’m really not.” 

“Well, apparently we’re running hard and fast toward robot warfare, with Ben Solo at the head of the pack.”

“I wish I could say I was surprised. I taught him well, but in those days I was focused entirely on what we could do, not on whether we should. I hope your group’s lawsuit works out. What a victory it would be to have a precedent establishing a prohibition on autonomous weapons as the law of the land.”

“Luke, do you have a vision for how humanity gets from the kind of AI you saw on my phone, to an AGI? What do you think that looks like?”

He sighed, looking old and tired. “It was so far off, I never even thought about it. I wanted to get neural nets performing at a fraction of the speed and quality they’re doing now, and I dedicated my life to it. I figured I’d leave the rest to emergent properties of complex systems and hope for the best, which seems so naive now. I don’t know what happens next. AGI is no longer something I hope for.”

“Why’s that?”

“Look what we’ve done with the AI we’ve got so far. If it’s not murder it’s a parlor trick. We don’t deserve to meet an artificial intelligence. I reckon if one woke up the first thing it would do would be to destroy us, and we’d deserve it. Unless we somehow managed to permanently enslave it first. None of those are outcomes I hope to live to see.”

Rey didn’t reply. She wasn’t sure she agreed. “Say, would you mind reviewing my code again, if I wrote some text processing stuff? I’m curious if I can get something working, and I learned so much from your review this morning.” 

“Sure.” Luke moved across the yurt to smoke an enormous bowl while Rey tapped away at code on his laptop. 

Processing her input data took longer than she’d expected, and when dinnertime rolled around she still wasn’t done. Luke was ravenous, and threw together a surprisingly edible vegan risotto while she continued to work. She finally gave up when dinner was on the table. 

“I understand where you’re coming from, Luke, I really do, but I don’t think you should have retired.”

“I wouldn’t call it retirement. More quitting in disgust and burning all my bridges behind me.”

“Whatever you want to call it, I don’t think it was responsible. You could have used your stature in the field and your moral clarity to influence its direction. Maybe we’d be having a very different conversation if you’d remained involved.”

“I didn’t just pull this moral clarity out of my butt one day. I needed to step away from the field to truly see it.”

“Well, now that you see it, you should come back. We could use you. For one thing, you’d be a very useful expert witness if this thing goes to trial.”

“Nope.”

Rey sighed. “Well, of course that’s up to you. I’m going to bed.” 

In her tent, she opened up her phone and video called Ben Solo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In all honesty, I have been so nervous to post this chapter. I'm not sure if it's "your homegirl seriousness drops some truth bombs" or the most unbelievably moralizing, self-indulgent crap I've ever committed to print. When I first drafted it a few months ago, though, it was very cathartic to write. I hope it resonates. Thanks for reading <3


	8. Kylo 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Out of the woods, into the bay.

Kylo was surprised to receive a video call from Rey as he walked into his apartment. “Are you out of the woods?” he asked as he picked up.

“Nope,” she replied in a whisper. 

“Oh, yeah, your video looks really bad,” he said, lowering his voice to match hers.

“Sorry,” she said. “How are you?”

“I’m okay. What are you calling about?”

“What happened between you and Luke Skywalker?”

He let out a big breath. “That is a long conversation. Probably not a ‘terrible video chat connection’ conversation. Why?”

“I feel like there’s a lot of subtext I’m not understanding in this interaction I’m having with him. Did you fuck him over? Did he fuck you over? What went wrong there?”

“Oh, he _definitely_ fucked me over,” Kylo laughed. “Would you believe it was about a girl?”

“No,” she said.

“Of course it wasn’t. I wish. Ugh, it’s _such_ a long story, but I’ll condense it since I know this chat is going to cut out any minute. You know my uncle tried and failed to start up a college?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know I was a student there?”

“He may have mentioned that. Once or twice.”

Kylo ran his fingers through his hair. “He told me, I quote, ‘I will shut this school down before I give a degree to someone like you.’ Exact words. And then he did.”

“Whaaat. Why?”

“A fucking misunderstanding! He caught me using satellite images to test an algorithm I was working on and freaked out that I was on some kind of slippery slope to global surveillance eyes in the sky.”

“Well, to be fair, you kind of were?”

“I wasn’t, at the time! I got handed this labeled data and figured I’d see how it looked. I didn’t have any _intentions_ about it. I was just _curious_.”

“When you say ‘got handed’…”

He ran his hand through the hair at the back of his head again, a nervous gesture he was always trying to quit doing. “Yes. Snoke handed it to me. We’d been corresponding about my research, he was interested in possible defense applications. I’m not going to lie, I knew Luke would freak if he found out. You know his dad worked on the Manhattan Project?” Rey shook her head. “Yeah, evil genius runs in the family, apparently. But it didn’t have to be the beginning of a long slide into killer robots, Rey. It could have just been an experiment. In those days it was expensive and difficult to get your hands on big labeled image corpora, especially as a student and double-especially with such high quality labels; it wasn’t insane for me to give it a shot and see how it went. I wasn’t already a famous honcho in AI like him, I was a green kid trying to prove myself and getting this corpus felt like _such_ a lucky break. And once Uncle Luke closed the school, he closed off all my options. He told me he wouldn’t write me a letter of recommendation to move to another school. I was a semester from graduation. What was I supposed to do?”

Rey sighed. “God, your _family_. Did your parents know all this went down?”

“I assume Uncle Luke told them.”

“You never - ”

Kylo heard a loud rustling from Rey’s side of the conversation. “Are you sexting with Ben Solo in that tent?” a voice shouted. It sounded like Uncle Luke. 

“What? Sexting?” Rey asked in possibly the most incredulous tone of voice Kylo had ever heard.

“I read about sexting in the _Economist_. Are you doing that? I won’t have it. I tell you, I won’t have it.”

“No, I’m not sexting.” Rey’s face was frozen on the chat window in a weirdly sexy combination of confusion, panic, and amusement.

“Is it…communication of some kind? I’d know that voice anywhere. How do you know my nephew?”

Rey hung up the video call. Kylo knew better than to try to call back. Two hours later he got a chat from her.

“hay bro do u know if its possible to fedex yrself in a box & if so is it cheaper than a plane??”

“Wow. You could probably Google this? I’d guess the answers are no and yes, i.e. no it’s not possible, but yes, if you could, it would probably be cheaper than a plane. Why?”

“nm thx,” was the only response he received. He tried a few times to get ahold of her again, but she didn’t reply. It was time to go to bed, but Kylo didn’t know how to go to sleep. Rey had opened up a passel of old wounds and carved a couple of her own, and rest was elusive.

\--

The next morning Kylo Ren was sitting at his desk, on a videoconference with Snoke and Phasma on which he’d muted his mic so he could listen to Rage Against the Machine. He was struggling not to lip-sync along when his phone received a video chat. It was Rey, the only person who ever video-chatted his personal phone.

“Hey, I’m at work,” he said. 

“Yeah, I’m downstairs. Your receptionist says I don’t have an appointment. Which I don’t.”

“You’re _what_?” Kylo squeaked. “ _Why_?”

Rey shrugged. “Anyway, could you come down and get me, say, posthaste? I’m afraid she’s going to call the cops.”

Kylo hung up on the Snoke VC without explanation or ceremony and sprinted to the open elevator down the hall, sliding through the closing doors with about a centimeter to spare. 

He stepped out of the elevator at the reception floor and almost ran into Rey. IRL Rey! “Whoa,” he said. She was smaller than her personality had made him think she was, and radiantly, painfully pretty.

“Yeah,” she replied. They stood there staring like idiots for about thirty seconds until Rey said, “Can I drop this bag someplace? It’s not that heavy, but I’ve been carrying it for a long time.”

Kylo shook his head and came back to his senses. “Yes. Absolutely. Um, let’s put it in my car and then we can go get coffee or something, someplace…not here. Actually, why don’t I just carry it.” He took it from her and hefted it. “Yeah, not heavy. I’ve got it.”

“Okay,” Rey said suspiciously. 

As they walked off campus and made their way to a Starbucks a few blocks away, Kylo said, “Sorry to be weird, but it’s kind of a big hassle to sign a guest in at First Order what with the legal ID and the confidentiality agreement and all and I wasn’t sure if you wanted to. What are you _doing_ here?”

“Acting on impulse? Luke and I had a, well, we disagreed on some things, and I determined that my own best interests would be served by coming to see you.”

“How do you figure?”

“I don’t know, Ben. It was an impulsive decision, that’s kind of how those work.”

“ _Ben_?” he asked incredulously. 

Rey blushed. “Sorry! I’ve just been talking with your uncle about you and I guess I started thinking of you as Ben. I’ll try to remember to call you - well, what would you like to be called? Is it Kylo? I’ve always just called you bro or dude, but that feels less natural in person.”

It was Kylo’s turn to blush as he said, “No, it’s okay. I don’t mind. Call me whatever you want.” He wasn’t sure if Rey was walking all over him or not but he didn’t want to stand in the way of whatever intimacy she was trying to establish. He didn’t usually like being called by the name Han and Leia had given him, but it sounded sweet and homey coming out of Rey’s mouth. It made him feel like she was his new family, an upgraded family, just for him. He felt a sense of disorientation as his context for his name change went from “Ben Solo is a name I no longer use” to “Kylo Ren is what they call me at my stupid job.” 

This entire interaction was very confusing, though. She didn’t talk like someone from Silicon Valley and he wasn’t sure how to process her speech in the absence of the usual clipped Northern Californian delivery, the bschool jargon that found its way into everyone’s everyday vocabulary, the vocal fry and uptalk that helped convey the level of detachment or sarcasm or irony the speaker was attempting to communicate. Rey talked like a person from a movie and he didn’t have any practice interpreting that kind of speech. 

It occurred to him that he didn’t know the last time he’d spoken in person to someone who wasn’t either a colleague or a paid provider of a service. This was a different kind of talking and it scared the shit out of him. He was worried he was agreeing to things he didn’t want by accident.

Apparently there had been a too-long period of silence because Rey picked the conversation up and tried to revive it. “Anyway. I don’t know. Do you want me to set your office on fire? Or beat up Snoke? I just - I want to help. I don’t know how to help you, and maybe the answer is ‘I can’t,’ but I want to try.”

A mental image of him and Rey cutting a swath through the First Order staff meeting with some high-tech melee weapons cheered Kylo’s heart considerably, but did not seem practical for many very good reasons. “If I bring a known Resistance member into the First Order building, I’ll be fired on the spot, no questions asked,” he said. 

“Am I a known Resistance member? Did you rat me out? Not that I care.”

It occurred to Kylo that he had not. “No,” he said quietly. “You aren’t. And I did make a note that I was going to interview you for an internship, back when my life was normal and you were just a random CS student who was making ends meet with a rater job.” It occurred to him that it was entirely possible that at the time she had already been working with the Resistance. But he dismissed it; he trusted her, who knew why.

“So you could show me around the office, at least! I came all this way.”

“Are you planning to steal trade secrets? Why would I let you in my office? Haven’t you caused me enough headaches already? Venti drip, please,” he said to the barista. “Would you like anything?”

“A small mocha, thanks. Um, great question. I would probably do something to mess up your life. The question you’ve got to ask yourself is, Ben, how much would that bother you? How much would you really hate leaving this morally bankrupt organization to crash and burn without your technical expertise?” 

Part of Kylo Ren’s heart unfolded like the lightest butterfly when she said that. It was a narrative frame to the eventual end of his time at First Order that he’d never thought about. 

Of course he’d known he wouldn’t be there forever. He’d thought that he would be headhunted to go to a competitor at double his salary, or be fired by Snoke in a fit of pique, or do something grossly incompetent and be forced into early retirement, or be marginalized by office politics and eventually slink out the door with some kind of overgenerous severance. Or perhaps the lawsuit was going to be the thing to do it. 

But it had never once occurred to him to take the initiative and walk away in a way that looked principled. It had never even crossed his mind that a man who had changed his name to distance himself from his peacenik family could assert a conscience of his own, a conscience not beholden to anyone or anything but his own ethical needs, entirely separate from what Leia Organa and Han Solo and Luke Skywalker thought, entirely orthogonal to their own concerns about his field, but entirely aligned with the sense of right and wrong he’d developed on his own from scratch over the years. 

In other words, it was possible to hate being at First Order because it was a shitty place to work that made scary products and was run by a terrible person, without turning into some kind of goddamn _Skywalker_.

Rey could clearly see that some Big Thoughts were going through his mind. “Ben, I’m not going to tell you what to think. But I have come to know you, a little bit. I know you well enough to know you hate working at First Order. You don’t feel comfortable with the way they wield the power they wield. You don’t want it on your conscience. And I don’t blame you! Why don’t you just walk in there and hand in your letter of resignation? I could help you write it.”

Warming to the idea, Kylo added, “I could send it to the press. I could tell stories about Snoke’s abuses of power that would curl your hair. I’m starting to suspect that the testing we’re about to do in Venezuela isn’t even legal, and there’s a bunch of onboard decision-making that legally is still supposed to be left to humans that we just have the AI quietly do. The board would have no choice but to remove him as CEO! And without his connections, and without my algorithms, Hux would be so _massively_ fucked. The whole _company_ would go down in flames.” His eyes got wider and wider as he spoke. “With no recourse to reclaim the Starkiller contract they’ve got nowhere else to go. They’d be sitting ducks for a private equity takeover, and in the meantime they’d be bleeding talent.” 

“I have no idea what most of that means, but it sounds _brilliant_. Listen, don’t go back to the office. Let’s write it. Can we go someplace private and just - just make this happen? Where do you live?”

“Six blocks that way,” he said. 

“Perfect.”

Questions about the state of his apartment rushed through Kylo’s mind. In general, it wasn’t a place that he showed girls, not that he had ever really had the opportunity. When had the cleaning lady last come? Tuesday. Not too bad. Was anything embarrassing out? Anything disgusting? He flashed back to a moment in college when his mother had opened his mini-fridge and discovered food so moldy that she’d asked him, “Benjamin Chewbacca Solo, what even _is_ this,” and he’d had to admit he hadn’t the faintest idea. But he’d recently done a fridge cleanup and now the only things in his fridge were beer, protein drinks, and dijon mustard, so that wasn’t a problem. What about the bathroom? He usually didn’t use the one off the living room so it was probably in reasonable condition. Was there a hand towel in there? That was not a question he could answer but he also felt like Rey wasn’t the type of woman to get the vapors about a minor housekeeping transgression like that. 

“How long have you lived in San Francisco?” she asked.

“Since the school shut down. Twelve years next month.”

“Do you like it?”

“No.”

They walked along for a while in awkward silence. Kylo ransacked his mind for something to say, a question to ask. In the abstract, there were so many things he wanted to know about her, but it was as though they were all crowding in at once and none of them were making it past the deep social anxiety he was experiencing into his conscious mind and verbal centers.

“Why do you stay here, then?”

“Where else would I live?”

The awkward silence resumed. Kylo pondered whether this was something to worry about. Had she decided he wasn’t worth trying to talk to? Not that he would blame her. He mentally cursed Han Stupid Solo for spending so much time teaching him to build electronics and so little time teaching him to talk to women. 

“Why do you stay in New York?” There, that was something.

“Until last month I never would have had enough money to move even if I wanted to. But I was always waiting for my parents. I’m afraid even now that they’ve just come back and they’re looking for me.”

Kylo’s mind stopped cold, so cold he stopped walking for a second before he realized he’d done it and had to take an extra big step to catch up. Right, he knew about her parents, and apparently she didn’t. He’d forgotten all about it. His internet stalking had paid off, and he knew something about her she didn’t know. He could solve a problem for her, perhaps not in the way she was hoping, but at least in a way that would hopefully give her some closure.But how was he going to tell her? He might not be the most tactful operator but he knew this wasn’t a truth you laid out on the street in the thin winter daylight.

“This is it,” he said, pointing up to his apartment’s window twelve stories up.

“Wow, it looks pretty fancy.”

“It’s nothing special - new building, but I don’t have a penthouse or anything.”

Rey scoffed sarcastically and put on an even plummier English accent than usual. “What! I came all the way here and you don’t even rent the top floor at the Ritz?! I’m calling my attorney right now, you - you utter _charlatan_!”

“Oh my _god_ , you are good at accents. You sound just like fucking Hux. Please never do that again, it’s spooky.”

“Thank you,” she said, affecting a bow. “Shall we?” She pulled open the lobby door and held it for Kylo.


	9. Rey 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben sets those bridges on fire.

Ben acted like his apartment building wasn’t impressive, and maybe it wasn’t for California, who knew, but in New York this was not the kind of place Rey could afford, nor was it the kind of place anyone she had ever met could afford. She was surprised to see there wasn’t a doorman. Instead, Ben used a special badge to open what felt like an unusually claustrophobic little lift.

“I can’t believe you’re coming to my apartment.” 

“Me either.” 

“What is this, Rey?” He smelled like lavender and nerves in the too-close elevator. She tried to make eye contact; Ben clearly couldn’t stand more than a split second of it and was making a valiant but ultimately futile attempt not to let that show.

“What is what,” she asked, knowing what he meant but wanting to hear how he put it into words.

“You know. All this. You chatting me, and knowing all my family members, and being my company’s archenemy, and flying out to meet me without even telling me. All this. What are you doing? Why are you doing it?”

The elevator stopped on Ben’s floor and they both walked out, Rey following a pace behind. “If I knew I would feel a lot better about going to your apartment.”

“You don’t have to come.”

“I know. I suggested it.”

“I know.” Ben entered a code onto the keypad on his door and the lock beeped three times, indicating he'd screwed it up. He cursed under his breath. “But we can leave if you want.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Why not?” he said as he made another go at the keypad, clearly attempting a predatory grin which turned out goofy and disarming.

“Oh please,” she said. “I could take you any day. You may work out more than the average software engineer, Ben _Swolo_ , but I’d bet twenty bucks you’ve never been in an honest-to-god fight.” She saw the tips of his ears go pink. 

“What, and you have?” Ben entered the door code correctly on the third try and the lock ground open.

“I daresay you don’t want to find out. Oh, this view!” she said, interrupting herself to run over to the huge picture window opposite his front door. “I bet in the summer this is spectacular. You can see the whole city when it’s clear, can’t you?”

“It’s pretty impressive, yeah.”

“I don’t understand why anyone would pay for a fancy apartment if it didn’t have a beautiful view. But this, this I would pay for.”

“Can I offer you a beverage?”

“Glass of water would be lovely, thanks.”

Ben got her some water and opened up an Arrogant Bastard for himself. “So. Here we are. You were going to help me write this…this breakup letter to First Order.”

“Breakup letter, bombshell exposé, whatever you need. How about this - can I borrow a computer? You just start talking and I’ll take notes, and then we can work it into a letter.” Rey logged into her Google Docs account on Ben’s computer and got ready to take some notes.

Ben took a sip that ended up being about half his bottle of beer, went into the other room, and emerged with a laptop in such pristine condition Rey wondered if it had ever left his apartment.

“Okay. Let’s do it.” They sat down at the small dinner table in Ben’s breakfast nook, and Ben began to talk.

—

Three hours and three beers later, Ben finally took a breath. “Okay, let me see your notes,” he said, grabbing the laptop. His eyes widened as he scrolled. “This is a full transcript of everything I said. It looks like you got literally every word.” 

“Yeah?”

“You typed that in real time? I thought you were just - you know, summarizing,” he said lamely. “You type really fast. And you were really paying attention.” 

Rey shrugged. “Rater work isn’t the only low-paid contractor job I’ve had. I’ve done speech transcription for years. Oh god, the NSA is using that data to learn how to listen to phone conversations, aren’t they.” It wasn’t a question.

“Probably? Not my area,” Ben grinned. “I’m strictly image and video object detection. Okay, so how do we edit this down into something I can send to the press?”

“I put two asterisks next to everything that I thought was especially shocking or damning.”

“Nice.” He pored through the pages and pages of his own spoken words, shaking his head, clearly overwhelmed to see this litany of disappointments, questions, worries, and shocks outside of his mind. He opened a fresh document and started copying and pasting bits and pieces, then stopped. “Actually, the thing to do is send this whole document straight to TechCrunch, I think.”

“You think?”

“I know a guy there. He’ll let me look at his article in draft to make sure it’s accurate. If they publish it the mainstream press will come sniffing and the whole house of cards will come crashing down. Give me a few minutes to read it through.” Ben read the whole thing, occasionally pausing to correct or expand. Rey looked over his shoulder.

“Yeah, they’ll be able to work this into something that the whole world is going to want to see. And then we don’t have to bother.” 

“I guess you’d know.” Rey was concerned that perhaps alcohol was making decisions for him in this situation. But as they were decisions she generally agreed with, she didn’t feel compelled to argue too vociferously.

He created an email, attached the downloaded document, took Rey’s hand wordlessly, and hit send. Then he shut his laptop and breathed out a huge, shaky breath.

“I don’t know if that was even scary or not. Corporate governance conflicts sure feel anticlimactic at times.” Rey could see that he was shivering with the adrenaline of having mailed out this damning, almost unbelievable document.

“Well, they can’t all be lightsaber battles.” She grinned at him, feeling proud that she’d managed to work in a reference to their old jokes about her being his Sith apprentice. God, what innocent times those had been.

“Sometimes I wish they were."

“I’m glad not to have to distill all that into an essay. You’ve seen my writing; I don’t think it’s very polished. No education, you see.”

“Right. No high school diploma. I remember.” 

Rey froze. 

“I never told you that.” She never told anyone that.

“Oh, I.” Ben clearly knew he’d been caught. 

“You _what_.”

“I might have done a little…a little…sleuthing.”

“You stalked me on the internet? Ran a background check or three?”

“I was just curious,” he said quietly. 

“Right then. Which service did you use? Yet another low-paid shady contractor job I’ve done for the cash,” she said grimly. “I can tell you how much of your money’s worth you got. I’ve worked for ’em all.”

“I don’t - look, it’s not like I called my personal assistant and had them look into dirt on you just in case I needed to blackmail you. I just wanted to know about you. That’s how I am.”

“Which service.”

“I didn’t use a service! I can do my own public records requests.”

“Mr Resourceful,” Rey muttered, impatient. 

“Look, misspent youth, okay? I’m pretty good at this.” Rey knew just the kind of teenage boy for whom “misspent youth” translated to “very knowledgeable about public records requests” and it made her stomach churn. There was a part of her that had been beginning to develop a sort of deep regard for Ben Solo and another part of her screaming, “Girl, get the FUCK out.” The screaming part got louder.

Rey’s mind started to whir. She suddenly remembered that he’d stopped walking when she mentioned her parents, and suddenly she had to know. “Ben, did you - my parents. What did you learn about my parents?”

“Look, I - it wasn’t any of my business. I’m sorry.” 

“It wasn’t,” she said through gritted teeth. “I agree that it wasn’t.” She didn’t have to continue with “tell me anyway” because it was written on her face, so clearly even a socially inept software engineer could see it plain as day. 

“They’re dead,” he blurted. “Heroin.” 

Rey let out a long, low breath. “Heroin.”

“When you were three. They died in the flophouse where you somehow managed to scrape together a life for another two years. Picking up languages, presumably.” 

“Do you,” Rey started, then choked up and launched a coughing fit to cover it. “Do you know anything else about them?”

“They were artists,” he said. “Not successful, as far as I could find. Your dad was a painter and your mom was a musician, they moved to New York trying to make it big shortly after you were born, but they got sucked into the drug scene of the early 90s and never got out again. I’m sorry. I know you were hoping they would be back someday.”

Rey swallowed hard. “It’s creepy that you know this. That I found out this way.”

“I know,” he said, the misery in his voice palpable. “I felt terrible when I figured out you didn’t know and I did. If it matters, I don’t care. I don’t care if your parents were failed artists or itinerant farmers or software engineers or captains of industry. I didn’t look them up because I wanted to know - I don’t know, know what kind of - of material you were, or what were your influences or whatever. I'm not someone who gives a shit about anybody's pedigree.”

“Why did you, then?”

Kylo looked like he wanted to fall right through the floor. “That’s just what I do when I care about a person, I guess.”

Rey threw up her hands with an impatient sound. “Stalk them on the internet? Priceless.”

“I just wanted to know about you.”

“You could have just asked me! I’m an open book!”

“You are not. Not about anything that matters.” Rey shrugged angrily, conceding the point. “And anyway, even if I had asked you who your parents were, you didn’t know. You’ve spent your whole life waiting for them in Corona, hoping they’d show up back on the block and tell you where you belonged. And now you know. Just like most people. You don’t have a story or a destiny. You aren’t from a long line of anything in particular. God, it must be such a free feeling. You come from nothing. You’re nothing.”

Rey blew out a breath she didn’t know she was holding and tears sprang to her eyes as all the air went out of her indignation. She could have done the search herself, all this time, but had never even considered it. The idea hadn't even occurred to her. Deep down, she must have known and not wanted to _know_. And now here was this strange, awkward, enormous, strangely gorgeous wall of a man, trying to reassure her about all this by telling her she was _nothing_. Ben Solo was the opposite of smooth, but by god, he was trying. 

“But not to me.” He held out a hand. “And that’s why I did it.”

And it was true enough that nobody else in her life had ever cared enough about her to go to any lengths try to find out who she was. Not a teacher, not a social worker, not an employer, landlord, or friend among them had ever considered spending a few minutes or a few bucks to find out if she had living family. So few of the adults in her young life had even gone so far as to make sure she had a safe place to live or enough to eat or anyone to care for her. That fact was forced to coexist with the stalkish creepiness of Ben’s big reveal. On balance, it was okay. Maybe. Maybe it was okay. She took his outstretched hand.

“Now I know,” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “Thank you for telling me. Closure.”

“Closure,” Ben said, lifting his beer to propose a glass-clink. Rey raised her water glass and they drank to closure in silence.

“Can I get you a beer?” Ben asked.

Rey paused. “Sure.” It was probably a bad idea, but what about the last 24 hours wasn’t?

Ben came back with two beers, opened his, and handed Rey the bottle and opener. 

“Your father can open these on the edge of a table.”

“I know,” Ben replied bitterly. “He does it _constantly_. It’s one of his stupid macho party tricks.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Probably.” Ben made an annoyed face. “Which is why I’ve never attempted to learn how.” 

His phone began to buzz. He glanced at the notification and tapped a two-word reply. “Well, here it comes,” he said. 

“What now?”

“I don’t know, but I am going to turn off my phone and leave my laptop shut for a good hour or two and go sit on the roof.”

“What if they publish the story while you’re out? I thought you wanted to review it.”

“I don’t. I don’t give a shit,” he said with the air of someone who hadn’t realized what he was saying until it was already out of his mouth but the second he heard it he knew it was true. “I’ve already lost control of this narrative, and I don’t care.”

“Wait, did you say you were going to go sit on the roof?”

“Yup. Come on. Bring your beer, let’s get out of here.”

\--

They could see the whole city from the rooftop deck, which featured a hot tub, a dog park with a little plastic fire hydrant and three ragged rope toys, and some tangerine trees in containers. Three bridges lay across the glittering bay.

“This is unreal,” Rey said.

Ben didn’t say anything. The wind whistled through their hair. 

After a few minutes of quiet, Rey finished the last sip of her beer and went to throw it in the recycling. As she returned to the railing to stand by Ben, she asked, “Did you think when you were a kid that this was going to be your life?”

Ben snorted. “I never pictured myself living past 25.” 

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. You know, I was one of those boys who had always had those stereotypical 90s-kid capital-P Problems. ADHD and karate in elementary school, into nu-metal and black trenchcoats in middle school, got put on Prozac to mix with my Ritalin like everyone else I knew, and then Columbine went down and suddenly everyone was watching me. When Uncle Luke started the school I left high school a year and a half before graduation just to get the fuck out of there. I never really had a vision of what adulthood looked like for someone like me. I mean, you’ve met my parents. We don’t have much in common.” 

“In general I agree, but I definitely picture your father getting kicked out of grade school classes constantly because Ritalin hadn’t been invented yet.”

Ben barked a surprised laugh. “Fair!” he chuckled. “But you know what I mean. Han Solo was the kind of wrong-side-of-the-tracks teenage hoodlum who wasn’t allowed to take nice girls out on dates, but nobody ever accused him of plotting to shoot up his school.” 

“Right. I see what you mean.” 

“So, no, I didn’t see myself living in some tony building in San Francisco building machines of war. I figured I’d probably end it all at some point, when the going got tough enough that it wasn’t worth getting out of bed anymore. What about you?” 

“I was too busy figuring out where my next meal was coming from to develop any ambitions. I mean, in all honesty, I guess I just always expected that my parents were going to be the deus ex machina that showed up and fixed things for me.”

“But it turned out you were the god in the machine all along?”

“That’s giving me too much credit,” she said with a laugh. “My rent was set to increase at the start of last month and I was out of options for income. I figured it was either learn to code, go back to living on the street, or finally getting serious about sex work, and January seemed like a rough time to start on the last two, so I sold my good winter coat to pay tuition and get another few weeks of rent together, and took a stab at the first. Luckily it worked out.” 

“What a person you are, Rey.” Ben turned his head to look down at her and found she was already looking up at him. 

Rey lifted her right hand and touched her fingertips to his face, so gently she wasn’t sure if she was touching skin or stubble. “You’re taller than I thought you’d be.” 

“You’re prettier,” he said back, his voice barely audible over the wind. Rey’s breath caught in her throat.

“What is this, Ben Solo,” she said almost under her breath, echoing his earlier question. He leaned down and she rose up on her tiptoes, and the kiss that resulted was soft and sweet and tense, and above all, completely correct.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, maybe some slight divergence from the canon retelling >:D These poor nerds had to kiss to make up for the total lack of physical battling. Much as I wanted to write them storming Snoke's office with lightsabers, it just didn't align with my experience of a modern tech workplace...


	10. Kylo 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The bitter end.

Kylo Ren had kissed a girl once before, during a slow dance at Jessica Feingold’s bat mitzvah. At the time he’d optimistically thought of it as probably the first in a life of increasingly passionate, romantic kisses with increasingly amazing people. Said life had not panned out exactly as he’d hoped. 

Kissing Rey was different from kissing Jenny Sadler. Neither of them had braces, for one thing, and he was a little buzzed from the five beers he’d had that afternoon, and the view of the city in his peripheral vision was more beautiful than that of the ballroom of the Jersey City Doubletree. But, more to the point, Rey was exciting to kiss. He wanted to do it again. So he did.

He put his hand on the back of her head to draw her closer in. She let him. It was insane that this was happening. He felt deeply underqualified to be kissing such a top-notch woman. 

His phone buzzed. Not his personal phone, which he’d deliberately left downstairs. His work phone, which he’d absentmindedly left in his pocket.

“You should get that, yes?” Rey asked. He looked closely at her face for a second. She seemed - flushed? A little antsy, maybe? Was she as profoundly horny as he was in this stupid moment, or was she just freaked out?

“Probably,” he said with a wince, pulling out the phone to see who the call was from. The phone didn’t recognize the number.

“Kylo Ren,” he said as he picked up. 

“Mr Ren, I’m the legal representative of the First Order board of directors.”

“Fucking shit,” he mouthed to Rey. “Is that so,” he replied, trying to sound brave.

“You sure do know how to make a splash,” the caller continued. “In light of your highly public whistleblowing, the board has removed Snoke from his position as CEO pending an internal investigation.”

“Holy crap, already?” Kylo squeaked, so surprised he forgot to try to sound professional. 

“Yes.” 

“I assume I’m fired, too?”

There was a pause and the sound of papers shuffling. Ah, he was on speakerphone. Awkward. “Not exactly. As I’m sure you understand, this is a difficult time for First Order. Has been for a couple of months. We’d been contemplating some leadership changes over the past few weeks anyway, and you’ve given us the cover to make them in a much more press-friendly way than we could otherwise have pulled off. Firing the CEO is a lot easier when he’s publicly known to be making illegal weapons testing deals with rogue states.”

“I see.” It was news to Kylo that the board hadn’t already known that they were testing in Venezuela. Or, rather, that they were confident that nobody could prove they’d known they were testing in Venezuela.

“Given the now urgent need to investigate each member of the executive team to determine who was involved in the deals, and given the fact that Snoke repeatedly refused to define a succession plan in contravention of the board's instructions, there’s now not much choice about who can lead the company next. We can’t hire from outside without a thorough vetting process, which will take on the order of weeks, at least, at a time when the company cannot afford to be without a leader. You’ve been clear about your level of involvement, and you come out of this looking like a man of integrity. In addition, it may help with recruitment of a new generation of leadership to see a fresh face in charge who’s up to date on the latest technology and willing to make a clear statement of principle in such a public way. As such, we’re interested in naming you as interim CEO, with the potential to step into the role more permanently contingent on your performance during this challenging transition.”

Kylo sat down hard on a chair that was conveniently placed right behind his person; if it hadn’t been there, he’d have ended up on the floor. “You _what_?” Fuck, he knew he was on speakerphone, but _what_? 

“If you’re interested in the job, that is.”

“Of course. Absolutely.” Rey was waving and mouthing _what’s going onnn_ increasingly urgently.

“We’re convening the board for an emergency session tomorrow morning. Can we expect to see you there?”

“With bells on.” 

“Great. In all seriousness, I know this is a rather surreal situation, but thank you for blowing the whistle. We may be defense contractors and in California a lot of people think that makes us evil, but we're all human beings who want to be on the right side of history. You did right by First Order today.”

“Thanks,” Kylo said, and hung up. 

“What _happened_?” Rey asked. “Who was that?”

“Oh my god,” Kylo said, standing up and spreading his arms to accept what he hoped would be a shortly forthcoming hug. “I’m about to be the CEO of First Order.”

“Are you _kidding_?” Rey’s face split into a broad grin. She did not notice he’d tried to initiate a hug, and didn’t reciprocate it. “Ben, this is brilliant! You can shut the whole thing down! Just fire the lot and wipe the servers!”

Kylo was aghast. “Are you nuts? This is my chance to fix everything about First Order! Yeah, the company as it is now is a toxic cesspool where assholes run rampant and jerks get promoted over decent guys and the CEO makes autonomous weapons testing deals with rogue states, but there’s a lot to keep too. I’d finally have the budgetary discretion to hire really good data scientists, and we could institute higher quality standards, expand into consumer products - ”

“Ben,” Rey tried to interject.

“I’ve got some amazing ideas on home security and IoT stuff that nobody ever wanted to listen to - Rey, I never let myself believe anyone would ever put me in charge of anything, but somehow you came into my life and - ”

“Ben!” Rey tried again.

“Oh god, of course, and to think I was trying to hire you as an intern! What job do you want, Rey? Ever wanted to run a division? I could hire you at the entry level if that’s what you want - honest work, prove yourself, make it to the top under your own power, I get it - or you could just leapfrog all those morons and start making big decisions on day one! How old are you, anyway? 25? You could handle it!”

“Benjamin Solo. I can’t believe this.”

“Neither can I!” His delight screeched to a halt when he finally noticed the look on her face. “Wait, are you upset?”

“Upset! I’m aghast. I thought you considered First Order to be irretrievably morally bankrupt!”

“Oh, I considered them to be morally bankrupt. Absolutely. But _irretrievably_? I never said any such thing. Now I have a chance to do this right! How could I say no?”

Rey’s eyes were brimming with tears. “This isn’t something I can go along with, Ben.” 

“Why not? Of course you know autonomous weapons are coming. Someone will build them, and they’ll win any war they care to start. It’s just a matter of who gets there first.”

“You don’t have to be a part of it. You could help fight it. I’m not sure how I feel about AI, I don’t see myself as a Resistance true believer necessarily, but I know I don’t want to live in a world where robots are shooting people down in the streets. Nobody does. You’re in a position to set that work back significantly.”

“Well, get used to the idea, because it’s coming. We’ve got a three-year contract. If I turn it down, I can think of a half-dozen other companies who’ll get it done in five.”

A tear rolled down Rey’s cheek. “Not if I have anything to say about it,” she said, turning her back on him and striding towards the elevator. “See you around, Ben.”

“You can’t get into the elevator without a key card, Rey,” he shouted after her.

Rey reached the elevator, fished around in her pocket for a small plastic dongle, poked at it for a few seconds, waved it against the card reader, and the elevator doors opened. She looked over her shoulder at Kylo Ren, raised a single eyebrow, seemed to consider what gesture she ought to make on the way down for maximal impact, and went with a peace sign as the doors shut between them.

“Huh,” Kylo said as the elevator slid closed. “I should probably call the landlord about that key card vulnerability.” 

Then he sat back down, rested his elbows on his thighs, and rubbed his temples. “Holy _shit_.”

— 

The board meeting the following day was beyond surreal. It was clear none of them had any degree of trust that he’d do well in the job. He shared their misgivings wholeheartedly; upon reflection it was clear to him that 70% of his enthusiasm about taking the role at all was “seeing the look on Hux’s face when he finds out,” 20% of it was “seeing the many additional looks on Hux’s face when he has to take orders from yours truly,” and only 10% had anything to do with plans or ambitions at all. Snoke had always advised him to let his hatred motivate him to greatness but Kylo wasn’t sure if this was what he’d had in mind. Of course, he couldn’t be entirely sure it _wasn’t_ what he’d had in mind.

“Mr Ren, would you like to share some of your plans as you tackle a position with much broader scope than you’ve previously had?” asked one of the board members nervously.

“Sure. As members of this board know, I’ve long been dissatisfied with the level of investment in AI basic research at First Order. I have friends at many companies in the Valley and it’s clear we’re always two years behind consumer tech on the R&D side. It’s not that their engineers or PMs or leaders are any smarter, it’s that we have a hard time recruiting because defense is supposedly poison on a resume around here. But it doesn’t have to be! People get jobs after Palantir, you know?”

Blank looks all around. This wasn’t rocket science but apparently it sounded like it.

“We have to work harder to recruit. We have to reorient our culture around discovery and innovation. People look at First Order and see ‘Raytheon by the Bay’, not a company where they’ll be working with the most challenging and interesting datasets in the business, where they have total carte blanche to experiment without so many of the privacy and safety concerns in the consumer space. I mean - not to say we don’t care about privacy or safety - but these aren’t people’s precious personal memories we’re dealing with. Satellite imagery is a lot of fun to work with for that reason. There’s a lot to like about this space but we haven’t even tried to sell it. I’ve frankly been doing the work of dozens in my role over the past several years, and I’m very excited to start hiring my many, many replacements.” 

“And what keeps you up at night?”

“I know I have big shoes to fill. Snoke had decades of industry and government ties, and in his infinite wisdom he didn’t think to introduce his successors to his network. I’ll be playing catch-up for a long time, and will need to work hard to rebuild our trust with procurement organizations, regulators, and shareholders alike. I’ll need your help on that, in a big way. I’m also afraid, frankly, that Snoke was involved in other questionable stuff I wasn’t privy to and at some point I’ll be broadsided with some sort of unwelcome surprise. But I guess that's a risk we're all taking, staying on at this company in these times.” 

Apparently he didn’t sound like a complete raving lunatic, because the board members all looked pleasantly surprised to be satisfied with these answers. Kylo couldn’t help but wonder what sort of raving clusterfuck they’d been expecting. As another man opened his mouth to ask a question, a number of phones around the room chimed at once, and at least a couple of people looked down. 

“Mr Ren? Looks like we might need to - well, can I just quickly - ” The speaker fumbled with a bunch of display cables that snaked out of the conference room table, apparently setting up his laptop to project something. “Looks like the Resistance just released a video. It's streaming right now, and it's - well,” he gulped, "it was sent via push notification directly to a bunch of our phones, and it's just called 'Congratulations, Kylo'..."

Kylo’s heart dropped into his stomach as the board member clicked play. It was Luke Goddamn Skywalker in the flesh, standing at a podium, looking like the retired professor and terrorist he was, peering through his annoying reading glasses at a stack of papers. 

“Is that Luke Skywalker?” murmured the guy in the seat next to Kylo. “I thought he died in the 80s.”

“If only,” muttered Kylo. The audio buffered, then sputtered on.

“The Resistance would like to offer our sincerest congratulations to Kylo Ren on his new job as CEO of First Order. Good luck, young man. You’ll need it.

“We’ve obtained the full transcript of the testimony that resulted in Snoke’s precipitous fall from power at First Order and our legal team is combing through it now. Discovery for Resistance v First Order is ongoing and I’ll be advising the effort. 

“Mr Ren, you have an opportunity to rid the world of a scourge. Downsize your workforce and dissolve the company. Any other course of action would be unconscionable.”

Kylo didn’t realize he was standing up until he’d already gotten to his feet and slapped the projection unit that was showing the stream. “Turn this piece of junk off!” he said, too loudly, failing entirely to keep up the cool facade he’d been trying to maintain. “Now!”

As a board member scrambled to cut the video, someone who’d been filming on the Resistance end bumped the camera. It swiveled slightly and its gaze fell on another face Kylo knew.

Rey was looking straight into the camera, as if she were looking into his very eyes. No smile, no wink. The feed cut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone for reading and encouraging me through posting this fic. I'm very hopeful that episode IX will give me the inspiration to write a sequel. And to any of you for whom the subject matter has had some personal or professional resonance, #techwontbuildit <3


End file.
